


the expanding sun

by hardkourparcore



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: AI and Android Characters, Alien Character(s), Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, F/M, Gen, M/M, Non-Binary Linhardt von Hevring, Non-binary Hapi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Trans Caspar von Bergliez
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27803416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardkourparcore/pseuds/hardkourparcore
Summary: In the distant reaches of the universe, in an isolated little solar system, sits a dead planet full of paradoxes.  By all accounts, it should be full of life, but it sits completely dead.  The research station FARGUSS was built upon it to study this inconsistency and the strange star it orbits.  Colloquially called 'the impossible star', the planet's sun shines a bright purple.  Its uniqueness is what drew Caspar and Linhardt to FARGUSS; to see one of the many strange things the universe has to offer.  Unfortunately, their visit is not the pleasant vacation they expected.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Linhardt von Hevring, Hapi/Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	1. FARGUSS

**Author's Note:**

> here is my 2020 nanowrimo! last year i brought you ferdibert cosmic horror and this year it's casphardt... cosmic... horror... but different i swear! since as of posting (most of) the whole thing is already written, i'll be uploading new chapters once a week around 3 EST on mondays until the whole thing is finished. i may have worked my fingers off all of november to write this, but this is so i don't stress out my artist too much!
> 
> each chapter will be illustrated by my best friend [trikey!](https://twitter.com/__freelancer) he's done an amazing job, please check out his twitter for more awesome art. he also designed all of the aliens from me giving him just a vague description of what i was thinking of and he did such a great job!!
> 
> BIG BIG THANK YOU TO [TE](https://twitter.com/Saringold_) FOR EDITING THIS! when i was planning this i looked over everything i liked and didn't like from last year's nano to help improve the quality of this year's, so i'm so thankful to have really good feedback on how to tighten up and make the whole thing better. her input has been so helpful!
> 
> other things of note: hapi for this fic uses she/they pronouns. in between chapters i will be switching which i use to refer to her as, so in chapter three they will be referred to as they/them and so on.
> 
> that's all i have to say, i hope you enjoy!

The cramped transport shuttle was barely enough for the four people within. It was sorely outdated, and even as it drove through space at lightspeeds typical for long-distance travel, it shuddered like an engine nearing the end of its life. It moved along a pre-programmed route. The shuttle’s only entryway was at the back, while the important navigational mechanisms were located towards the front. The passengers sat somewhere in between, crowded onto the long seats that lined each side of the shuttle.

Linhardt looked out the shuttle’s one window rather than at their fellow passengers. They wanted to watch the star systems that the trip offered them a glimpse of. At the end of their trip, according to Caspar, there was going to be a very special star that he wanted to show them up close. For now, they were more than satisfied with staring at the cloudy colors spanning the galaxies they passed at such a distance.

  


Hushed giggles sounded from the other side of the shuttle. The other two passengers had been discussing something between themselves. Linhardt had been listening on some level. If they wanted, they could search through their recent memory storage and listen back on whatever they’d absently recorded in the previous moments.

Caspar, sitting beside Linhardt, spoke up. “You two better not be laughing at us,” he said. There was a slight edge to his voice. Linhardt had noticed he’d been a bit sensitive ever since they had run away from their home ship. When they had brought it up, he’d said he didn’t want Linhardt to have a bad experience off the ship.

“Never,” the feathered one on the right said lightheartedly. He was some sort of alien race Linhardt didn’t have stored in their references. Their databanks suggested some kind of avian -- he was covered in purple feathers, with long plumes flowing from the top of his head to his shoulders. He had wide, round eyes, and a beak instead of a nose and mouth.

His companion, as far as Linhardt could see, was completely human. She had darker skin than Caspar though, and her red hair was pulled to one side. The two of them wore similar robes, loose-fitting and neutral in color. To Linhardt’s untrained eyes, they were completely foreign.

“If you’re this jumpy all the time, are you sure you want to be all the way on this side of the universe?” the bird-person asked. “I’d hope you’re fully aware of where this trashy little shuttle is headed.”

“Yeah, of course we are,” Caspar replied. Linhardt looked at him. The superficial temperature on his face was rising ever so slightly. That was a warning sign in exirians, but completely common in humans. As Caspar was a mix of both, it was important for Linhardt to monitor these things.

“Wait,” the human cut in with a level voice. “Is that an LN-8010 nursedroid? You’re bringing  _ that _ to FARGUSS?”

Linhardt was distantly impressed that she could recognize their model number. They’d changed their clothes and styled their hair far differently than what was common for an android of their make, but being recognized was wholly unsurprising. They couldn’t change many things common to the LN line, at least not without expending considerably more effort than they and Caspar were willing to give.

“Their name is Linhardt,” Caspar snapped, as if the question was anything to feel insulted over. “They want to go more than I do, anyway. This is for them.”

Not in so many words, it wasn’t. Caspar had heard of a purple star, which, according to some textbook he’d read in school, was impossible. Since Linhardt had a passing interest in stars, he’d decided immediately that he wanted to show it to Linhardt, in person, and that was a good enough reason as any now that they were travelling the universe together. Linhardt still had only a tentative grasp on what it truly meant to “want” something. They had no reason not to see this purple star, but they would have just as easily gone wherever else Caspar led them. If Caspar saw this trip as being “for them,” then they saw it just as much as being “for him.”

The human’s eyebrows raised slightly. “So they’re rogue? You’re bringing a rogue android to FARGUSS?”

“They’re not rogue, either!” Caspar objected. “They’d never hurt anyone!”

“I’m rogue but harmless,” Linhardt quickly added. “I’m still learning higher thought. Caspar gets upset if someone implies I’m rogue, because I was almost reset for it.”

“Caspar and Linhardt, hm?” the avian said. “I suppose that earns you our names. I’m Yuri. This is Hapi.”

Hapi hummed, but clearly had her mind elsewhere. “How old are you, Linhardt?”

They paused to run a quick calculation. “I’ve been operational for seven years, ten months, sixteen days, and some three hours by Earth measurements, with room for error. My internal clock is a few microseconds slow. If you’re asking how I became rogue, I believe it has to do with my isolation from the extranet. I was never registered as a product nor allowed to receive automatic updates.”

She nodded, satisfied. “Then you might be okay on FARGUSS.”

“What does that mean?” Caspar asked. Linhardt was beginning to excel in reading concern on his face or in his voice. He was concerned a lot when Linhardt’s safety was in question.

“Jeez, you should read up on places before you ride an FTL-shuttle to the edge of the universe to visit them,” she replied. “The radiation from the sun there affects FARGUSS strangely. All of the personnel on-site are organic because lower-grade AI end up failing without proper protective shielding. It might be fine if you’ve never had an extranet connection; otherwise, you could just shut off until the next shuttle stops by to pick you up.”

Linhardt tried to envision what the experience of shutting off entirely would be like, but had no reference or basis for it. They considered defining it as robot death for an instant, then quickly decided that was a useless comparison. They could certainly be powered back on, even if it meant losing some of their memory or functioning, while an organic person could never be brought back to life.

“No offense,” Hapi continued, “but you’re not exactly high-grade. You might get interference regardless.”

They couldn’t imagine what would be offensive in that observation. It was simply the truth. “I consider it an advantage,” they said. “If I break somehow, it will be much easier to replace or repair.”

She let out an amused sound, smiling slightly. “You’re still stuck with your programming, huh?”

They were, indeed.  _ Replace, Repair, Recycle _ had been an advertising slogan they’d had in their mind from the moment they’d switched on. They didn’t have much context for it, but they had the self-awareness now to realize its purpose. They frowned slightly.

Hapi continued regardless. “Anyway, you  _ want _ to go to FARGUSS? For what?”

“The star,” Linhardt replied.

“Yeah!” Caspar chimed in. “Neither of us have ever seen one so close before, and they call this one  _ impossible _ , so it’s definitely worth seeing. Right, Linhardt?”

“It’s as good as any,” they said with a small shrug.

They wanted to see the star, or they at least thought they wanted to. They liked seeing stars from far away, but hadn’t a chance to see one any closer. Both Linhardt and Caspar came from a colony ship that was set to float aimlessly through the universe as a self-sustaining city. Neither of them had ever been on a planet before, or so close to a star. Atmospheres and planet rotation were foreign concepts that both of them had already agreed were worthwhile experiences.

“It’s not a star,” Hapi said.

“Wh -- Of course it’s a star!” Caspar leaned forward in his seat. “Why would anyone be calling it a star if it’s not a star? What else could it be?”

She tilted her head to one side, eyes shut, lips pursed. “I’m not sure what it  _ is _ , yet, but it’s not a star.”

Beside her, Yuri let out an exaggerated sigh. “That’s science for you. It only tells you what things  _ aren’t  _ or  _ can’t  _ be.”

“Yeah, that’s science,” Hapi agreed with a smile. “But it’s not a star. That’s what’s obvious about it. FARGUSS is studying it as if it’s a star, but their research won’t go anywhere until they change their ways of thinking.”

“So that’s why you two are going,” Linhardt determined. “To prove them wrong.”

“Might as well,” Hapi said.

“Well, it’s a personal visit for me, too, even if Hapi won’t admit it. We have friends living there.”

FARGUSS was an acronym. It stood for Far Away Research of Gravity and Unusual Solar System. The station itself was settled on a lifeless planet, sitting away from the star at a distance that was supposedly comparable to Earth. Linhardt had filed away all this information once Caspar had begun planning on taking them there.

The comparison to Earth had come up many times in reference to FARGUSS, but without any knowledge of Earth or how extraordinary it was as a planet, Linhardt found those tidbits useless.

What they  _ had _ found was an ancient application for a thirty-day tour of FARGUSS, including room and board. From their observations, the last tour given to civilians like that had taken place over a decade ago, but since they were still offered, Caspar was able to sign them both up.

The resulting conclusion was clear, however; no one was going to this side of the universe.

The transport shuttle let out a noise as hidden speakers readied a pre-recorded phase. It sounded like an air filter, and the speakers crackled before a three-toned chime sounded and a woman’s voice began to speak.

“Please prepare for descent. Affix your seatbelts and assist those who may need help affixing theirs. This craft will land inside a decompression chamber, so no protective gear is needed for departure. Thank you for traveling with Stellar Spacelines! We hope to see you again soon.”

Linhardt heard three clicks as the other passengers strapped themselves back in. They followed suit. Once their seatbelt had clicked too, they felt the smooth scales of Caspar’s fingertips brush against their hand.

“Are you excited?” he asked in a low, almost reverent tone.

He asked questions like this fairly often now.  _ What do you want? Do you like it? Are you excited? _ Linhardt still didn’t know how to answer, or if even they had the ability to be truthful about it. They were disinclined to lie, but their present state certainly didn’t match the image of excitement they had in their database about human experience.

They wouldn’t jump out of their seat, or pace, or wring their hands together, or beam as widely as Caspar did when he heard their answers. They couldn’t even imagine ever getting to that point.

But they did give him a small smile. “I think I may be,” they said. It was as close to true as they understood it, and the grin that then spread across Caspar’s face would have been worth a small lie anyway.

There was a jarringly brief moment before the shuttle began its landing. It jittered and shuttered violently, to the point that implied some issue with the landing gear. The turbulence was loud, and at some point Caspar’s hand had wrapped around Linhardt’s, squeezing tightly.

It was a thing humans did for comfort, Linhardt knew, so they squeezed back.

They heard a great gasp of air as something mechanical depressurized, and the descent smoothed slightly. A small glance out the window afforded them a look of FARGUSS inside the atmosphere. The sky was a uniform lilac color. There wasn’t a star in sight. They couldn’t even see the reason they’d come so far from this angle.

A moment later, the lilac sky was replaced with gray steel and smooth plating. The shuttle slotted itself into a landing bay, which began emitting a loud alarm to alert the occupants of FARGUSS that they had visitors, and to alert the visitors that they had now completely landed.

The pleasant voice thanked the four passengers again for riding with Stellar Spacelines, and reminded them of the 11-digit code they needed to redeem for their free trip back. Linhardt stored it easily, because they knew Caspar would forget it. The four of them all casually undid their seatbelts and began filing out the exit to the rear.

When Linhardt’s feet hit the steel plating lining the floor of the entry bay, they looked down. This was genuine gravity, not some manipulation of physics to replicate it for the health of those living here.

Caspar didn’t seem to notice how novel it was. He was tugging at their arm, pointing at the door to enter the research facility proper. “C’mon, Lin,” he said. “We don’t want to get left behind!”

Yuri and Hapi were already at the door, seemingly polite enough to at least wait for the two strangers. Linhardt thought it was a bit obvious that the two likely thought less of them for having flimsy or even whimsical reasons for being here, but they weren’t about to ruin Caspar’s fun by suggesting such a thing to him.

“Did you tell Coco ahead of time, Yuribird?” Hapi asked her companion.

“I did. And I hung up on her before she could go on a tirade about us visiting or whatever she was about to launch into. That girl does not understand how expensive long distance calling can be.”

Hapi covered her mouth to hide a giggle. “That’s Coco.”

She opened the door and stepped inside. It made sense, this being a research facility, that there was no reception room like many passenger ships or satellites tended to keep. There would be no orientation about what to do or see while visiting, nor any sort of pamphlets about tourist traps or restaurants. Instead, the four stepped into the middle of a nondescript hallway, with little more than a plastic sign proclaiming that the cafeteria was somewhere to the left, and that the greenhouse was somewhere to the right.

It was unique in that respect from all of the other places Linhardt and Caspar had gone so far, which made it more interesting.

“She’s not here,” Yuri observed.

“She probably got wrapped up in something again. I’ll let her know we’re here.”

Hapi pulled out a small phone from her pocket and began tapping away on it. Linhardt only recognized it because somewhere in their mind, their manufacturing company had bestowed them with knowledge about all company products. That phone seemed reminiscent of what had been the fastest phone on the market when Linhardt had been made. It was either an expensive and high-end product in Hapi’s hand, or an outdated piece of hardware that she didn’t want to replace.

“Hapi? Yuri? You guys made it!” A deep voice sounded from the left side of the hallway before Hapi had finished with her phone, and all four of them turned to see who it belonged to.

Linhardt had scant information on qaggar. They knew the qaggar were a burly race better suited for hot climates, and that their keratinous scales offered hearty protection for 83% of their bodies but was prone to infection without proper hygienic care. They had not expected the qaggar man before them to be big enough to nearly block the entire hallway.

He was wearing a zipped-down jumpsuit, baring most of his chest, and was girded with some belt made of sturdy fibers. He was mostly dark in color, so his wide grin stood out starkly against his fur and scales.

“Balthus!” Yuri said. “Good to see you, friend.”

“Hey, B.”

Balthus took a few excited steps forward before realizing Caspar and Linhardt were also present, and looked at them quizzically. It was clear Balthus was the type of man who wore his emotions plainly on his face.

“You brought… friends?” he asked.

“They brought themselves, really,” Yuri answered. “Apparently they’re just here to visit.”

“Well, damn. No one tells me anything around here,” Balthus chuckled good naturedly. “Good to meet you two. Name’s Balthus.”

Caspar had a grin to match his. He too was the sort of man whose face easily gave away how he was feeling. “I’m Caspar! This is Linhardt.”

Linhardt raised their hand in a lazy wave.

“I can lead you guys to where Constance was studying. You told her you were coming at least, right? She probably knows what to do about those kids, too, so…”

Balthus continued speaking, but another voice interrupted him, ringing clear and crisp in the hallway. It was somehow meek and commanding at the same time; its shyness demanded Linhardt’s attention, and they gave it.

“Hello…” it said. “Excuse me for interrupting. I hope we can be friends.”

Linhardt glanced around the hallway, but only five people were present, including themself. No one else seemed concerned or bothered by this voice, so they found no reason to be concerned or bothered by it either.

Balthus, still talking about something, motioned for the group to follow. They did, so Linhardt did too, keeping pace a bit behind the others. It took Caspar just a moment to fall back and keep pace with them.

“Okay,” Linhardt replied back.

Caspar looked up at them.

“Wonderful,” the voice said. It sounded like it was smiling, but Linhardt still wasn’t confident about determining emotion from only sound. “Will you come visit me in electrical sometime later tonight?”

“Okay,” they said again.

They were able to hear Balthus again. He was telling Yuri and Hapi how he thought being a janitor was okay, but he thought the engineers’ standard of cleanliness was too demanding. They didn’t listen very closely to him themself, because Caspar began speaking.

He used a low voice to keep the conversation private. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Linhardt said. “I was replying to the sixth person.”

Caspar’s brow furrowed like it always did when they said something that didn’t make sense to him. They had said strange things before by accident. After awhile, they had learned it was just a quirk of being mechanical. Organics and inorganics thought differently, and the two had encountered that enough to coexist without incident when it cropped up. At this point, Caspar could usually follow whatever logic Linhardt had based their statement on, but this time, it seemed to have eluded him.

“Who? There’s five of us. I didn’t see any sixth person.”

Linhardt paused. “They didn’t give me their name. What’s your name?”

The voice didn’t respond, but they heard a crackling sound from slightly behind them and to the right. They turned their head, but the sixth person wasn’t there.

“They seem to have left,” Linhardt reported.

Caspar’s brow remained furrowed. He glanced to where Linhardt was looking, but didn’t seem satisfied with what he saw. “Can you let me know when they come back?” he asked.

He wasn’t good at hiding how he really felt. Linhardt could tell this wasn’t him being friendly. In another situation, this would be atypical of Caspar, but Linhardt could see his reasoning.

“Are you worried about what Hapi said?” they asked him.

Caspar opened his mouth to answer, but a splitting shriek cut through the air and drowned out any answer he could have given.

“--IIIIIIII!!!!”

The five had made it to an intersection, hallways sprawling out in three directions from the one they’d just come from. From the right hallway, the shriek grew increasingly louder as the woman making it drew ever closer to the group.

She was a gruk, a plant-like race with mostly green, smooth skin. Her leafy vines were styled mostly like hair, curled pleasantly on either side of her face. Linhardt was surprised to see her adopting a bipedal stance as gruks were usually oriented more like beetles or ants. As she threw her arms around Hapi exuberantly, they could see a metal frame poking out from her sleeves. Her vines curled around it, and they concluded that she used it for support.

“It is  _ so  _ good to see you! And  _ you _ , Yuri!” She pulled away from Hapi as immediately as she’d hugged her, moving her ‘hands’ to her hips indignantly. “How  _ dare _ you hang up on me! How can you be so rude to your own friends like that!”

“...Good to see you, too, Constance,” he replied flatly.

She hugged him regardless, even though her four eyes were squinted angrily and it wasn’t as enthusiastic as the one she’d given to Hapi.

“I am just so excited to study with you, Hapi! We’ve always been great study buddies haven’t we?” She started this sentence near Yuri’s ear, and ended it by beaming at Hapi.

Linhardt made a note that some facial expressions could not be shared between races due to anatomical differences, and began making catalogues so they could properly record the happy and sad faces of gruks and qaggars and whatever race Yuri was.

Hapi didn’t have a chance to respond before Constance continued, unbidden. “It’s  _ soooo _ boring here as the only scientist. This place is so empty! There’s just me, the three engineers keeping this ship running, and Baltie, of course. The main AI is okay at conversation but I have absolutely  _ no one  _ to share my genius with!”

Her description didn’t match the one Linhardt had read before as they and Caspar had pored over the websites describing FARGUSS. “I read that FARGUSS kept a staff of at least fifteen engineers and ten scientists,” they said.

Constance let out a peeling laugh, loud and boisterous. She was the only one laughing, but it filled the hallways. Linhardt decided easily that they wouldn’t like to hear it again, given the choice.

“Oh, it hasn’t been that bustling in ten years!” she responded at last. “Why, by the time  _ I  _ arrived, there were exactly three engineers, no researchers, and no janitors!”

Linhardt looked over to Balthus, but Constance wasn’t done speaking. “Can you imagine? This marvelous anomaly just begging to be understood and absolutely no one was around to study it! But I, Constance von Nuvelle, intend to unravel this star’s mysteries and share them with the entire universe out of the kindness in my heart.”

“It’s not a star,” Hapi said.

“Yes, can you imagine? ‘Constance’ in big, beautiful blue letters: the elucidator of the impossible star! The purple sun’s singular scholar! Why, it’s sure to put my home planet on the map! No more taunts and teases about being a leafy bug girl -- Ahahaha!”

“Coco. It’s not a star,” Hapi repeated.

“And then I’ll--What did you say, Hapi?”

Hapi opened her mouth to repeat herself yet again, but Constance cut her off.

“It is a star. Look at it. You saw it burning brightly in the sky, giving--Well, it doesn’t exactly give life as far as our tests can tell…” Constance’s open body language changed. She clasped her hands in front of her. “If it isn’t a star, then what could it possibly be?”

“That’s what I came to find out, because it’s definitely not a star.”

Caspar stomped his foot in sudden frustration. “Are you kidding? We came all this way because it’s a star!”

“C’mon, Cas.” Hapi turned in his direction, smiling slightly. “You didn’t really think the ‘impossible’ star was an actual star, did you? It’s purple. I don’t know where you came from, but they should teach basic astronomy. There are no purple stars.”

“A shame, really,” Yuri interjected. “They would be better in purple.”

Hapi elbowed him playfully, a wide smile on her face.

Caspar looked to Linhardt. “Are you upset that it isn’t a real star?”

Linhardt didn’t know how they could feel upset at all, considering they hadn’t seen it for themself yet. If they had seen it, marvelled at the beauty of basking in starlight for the first time in their on-state, and then were told it was false, maybe they would then have grounds to be upset. As it was now, they had no real feelings towards the situation.

“I’m not,” they replied. “But I still haven’t seen it yet. I would prefer seeing it before we leave.”

Caspar’s mouth tugged to the left in a sideways smile. He exhaled. “Alright.”

“You really  _ shouldn’t _ witness it directly,” Constance warned. “It’s a dreadful experience. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Caspar rolled his eyes, his head following in an exaggerated motion. “Come  _ ON _ , you guys  _ can’t _ keep doing this to us!”

“I’m inorganic,” Linhardt said quickly. “I don’t believe I can find any experience dreadful, so I believe I can witness it directly.”

Constance seemed to consider it for a brief moment. When Linhardt had observed other people in that same pose, however, with their hand (or her close approximation) pressed gently into their chin, head canted to one side, it seemed as though the consideration was just a show. In all likelihood, she was considering it for the sake of seeming like she was thinking about it, without actually changing her mind.

“...We’ll see,” she said at last.

She waved her leaves in the air beside her head, as if brushing away the thought. “There’s other things to do first, anyway. We’ll get the engineers to find you a suitable room, Hapi, and dust off some other rooms around here for these two tourists.”

Linhardt didn’t think they liked the word “tourist” when it was used to refer to them, even if it was factually accurate. They looked at Caspar again to see if they could determine if he felt the same.

“Is that really something you can’t handle for us, Constance?” Yuri asked. “I’d expect you of all people to be mostly in control of the place by now.”

“Well it certainly isn’t because I haven’t been trying!” she retorted, moving her vines to where her ‘hips’ might have been. “No, you can even ask Baltie. The engineers and their AI are touchy about the rules, and so they’ll be cross if we do anything at all without asking their permission first. Who knows where they even go at this time of day!”

She let out a dramatic, exasperated sigh. “And I suppose it is simply up to me to inform them, unleeeess some courageous mammal would volunteer in my stead!”

Linhardt wasn’t sure what she meant by saying this until she all but threw herself at Balthus, leaning into his side and grinning up at him.

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, fine. I’ll go look for ‘em. You give these folk a tour of what you can.”

“Thank you!” she squealed. “Let’s not waste any time. I’m so excited to show you my greenhouse!” 

She drew away from him just as quickly as she’d pressed herself to him and quickly began walking down the hallway she’d come from, ‘arms’ raised. Hapi and Yuri followed her at once, so Linhardt went too, but it took a moment for Caspar to follow.

Constance began speaking at length about her scientific breakthroughs. She was working on growing plants in conditions similar to those outside the research base, but without the pressurized and controlled conditions that were designed to simulate what was required for most organic life in the universe. In a sense, she was aiming to grow life using the conditions of this planet, which didn’t seem to have any life native to it.

Linhardt was interested, but Caspar spoke to them quietly, and they gave him their attention.

“Are you disappointed by any of this so far?” he asked. 

Linhardt considered the definition of the word disappointed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever felt disappointment,” they replied. “Even if I were disappointed now, I don’t think I’d be able to identify it, but so far I’m content with how things are developing.”

“Content, huh? You sure?”

“Well, contentedness is when one doesn’t feel any particular emotion strongly, isn’t it? I feel as I normally do, so I’m content.” They offered him a small smile. They were still in the process of normalizing their own emotional output. It had seemed helpful for Caspar in the past when Linhardt accompanied some of their statements with smiles or frowns, however small or poorly they performed them.

Caspar beamed back at them. He grabbed their hand like he did when he led them places, or wanted to offer them his support in a physical, tangible way. Linhardt was learning how he used touch and physical space to emote. It seemed like a higher level of understanding organic emotions, and they wanted to understand Caspar completely.

“I guess that makes sense,” Caspar said. “I just want to make sure you’re… y’know, having a good time. This was supposed to be a trip for you, so if you wanna leave, maybe we can hop back on that shuttle and get out of here without a problem.”

“I’ll keep it in my periphery processing,” Linhardt replied. “Now shush, that woman’s actually saying something interesting.”

The path to the greenhouse was rather long, and for the duration of their walk Constance spoke about how against all odds the planet was barren of life. Unlike uninhabitable planets, it had a thick atmosphere that not only protected the surface from UV rays, but offered a nitrogen-rich buffet of gasses not dissimilar to those found on the home planets where the galaxy’s core races originated. She even compared it to the gruk’s home planet, which also had a purple sky.

The anomalies of FARGUSS were many. The planet itself did not spin, nor did it have a tilted axis. It orbited the “star” they came to see, but without a spin or a tilt, the major theories attempting to explain gravitational forces were thrown out the window. Thus, it was a natural gravity they experienced on FARGUSS, but there wasn’t a well-explained reason for it.

“In the greenhouse,” Constance continued, “we’re attempting to grow all manner of plant life. We have samples native to Earth, DB-1207, Olexia, and more -- any species that could reasonably thrive off the atmosphere or the air mixture we use in this base. It has varying results.”

At that moment, they reached the greenhouse. The hallway ended at a large door, helpfully labeled with a large, lit-up sign. On the right wall beside the door was a softly glowing screen that reported various measurements and the current status of the greenhouse. According to its small, basic map, the greenhouse had three branches, likely for clean separation of control and experimental groups.

Constance pulled a card out of her jumpsuit and held it to the screen. An automated voice, one familiar to Linhardt, said, “Welcome back, Ms. Constance.”

“That’s it,” they told Caspar urgently. “That’s the sixth person.”

“The… screen thing?”

Caspar wasn’t very good with technology. Maybe it was a gift in its own right. His ineptitude at realizing the boundary between organic and inorganic was responsible for Linhardt realizing they had the motivation to do more than just sit behind the reception desk at a clinic run by a miserly old doctor. Computers that could talk, as far as he seemed concerned, were just as good as people, and computers that couldn’t were nothing more than wires and green boards.

“Yes. You’ll go with me to meet them, won’t you?”

“Yeah, of course!” Caspar’s grin came back easily. “If you’re making a friend, I definitely want to meet them, too!”

The door to the greenhouse opened into a small, triangular room. Before them were three doors, each leading into one of the three branches of the greenhouse. When the five had filed in and the door closed behind them, the chamber depressurized around them, meaning that each exit to this triangular room was air-tight.

“We have three greenhouses to keep everything under strict experimental control,” Constance explained. She gestured to each door in order as she explained, starting with the one on the left and moving to the right. “This one is our control. The lighting simulates a more natural sunlight that the plants have already been proven to flourish under. The atmosphere is exactly the same as the breathable mixture in the rest of this station.

“The middle room simulates a day and night cycle using metal shutters. For twelve hours, the plants receive sunlight from our anomalous star, and then the shutters close and they experience a false nighttime. Since this planet doesn’t spin in place, this is the only way to have a real day-night cycle. The atmosphere is, once again, the same air we’re breathing right now.

“Finally, our second experimental group is completely at the whims of this planet. The shutters are constantly open, so the plants inside are always under the light from our ‘star,’ and air vents cycle in a purified version of the atmosphere outside.”

“Pretty thorough experiment,” Hapi noted. “Have you been seeing the projected results?”

“Well…” Constance nearly wilted then. “I haven’t checked up on the second experimental group in maybe… three weeks?”

“You haven’t observed your experiment for nearly a month.” Hapi didn’t seem amused in the slightest. “Coco… You know that’s not how it works.”

“Of course I know how it does and doesn’t work!” Constance retorted, suddenly becoming re-animated. “It’s just… Well, I don’t like going in there, just as I don’t like visiting the first experimental group during the daytime.

“You know, this is the only place on the base where we have windows. The rest of the building only has artificial lighting that suboptimally imparts the daily recommended doses of vitamins D and C, and of course we don’t know everything about the star, so we don’t want to expose ourselves to it. I’m more vulnerable to it than the rest of the crew here, you know. You simply can’t know what it’s like to have chloroplasts.”

“Of course we can’t,” Yuri interjected dismissively. “But are you going to show us any of the insides?”

“Fine! Fine!”

Constance bustled over to the door she introduced first and swiped the card she’d produced before on a vertical card reader. It beeped approvingly and the door slid open.

The greenhouse, as Constance described, was alit in artificial sunlight. There were shutters lining all four walls, blocking out the star’s light from the outside. On the wall furthest from the entrance, a large, loudly-whirring vent hung from the ceiling, likely cycling the air in the room for the plants’ benefit. In the middle of the room were rows and rows of shelves covered in various plant life. They were all green or flowering. Linhardt didn’t know much about plant health, but they all seemed exceedingly healthy to them.

“FARGUSS has been growing food in this greenhouse since it was constructed twenty years ago. We know the plants thrive under these conditions, which makes it excellent as a control group, don’t you think?”

“So the shutters can still come up in this room?” Yuri asked. His taloned toes clicked on the metal floor as he walked toward one wall.

“They are  _ capable _ of it, yes,” Constance answered. “But they do  _ not _ come up in this room. In fact, they have not been raised in over ten years. When I began my experiment, it was the first time the other two had been raised as well!

“Since the number of personnel on base has gotten so small, we no longer need all three greenhouses for stocking our pantries.”

“Let’s see how the other plants are faring,” Yuri said. He was already walking back towards the door.

“If we must…”

Constance didn’t seem too pleased as she quickly closed the distance between her and the exit, hurrying so that she could cut off Yuri and beat him to it. “But if any of you feel poorly afterwards, we will leave at once.”

“Are we going to feel poorly in there?” Hapi asked. 

Constance opened the door and ushered the group through it, then hurried to the next door to hurry them into the second greenhouse. As she did so, she also answered Hapi. “Yes. Aside from the sun’s strange lifelessness, and the radiation it exudes, it seems to have an adverse effect on most lifeforms and…”

She entered the greenhouse first, growing quiet. Some of her leaves lost their curls, straightening into limp vines that rested lamely on her shoulders.

“I do hope you’re not disappointed…” she muttered.

Constance turned to watch everyone else enter, hands clasped in front of her.

The second greenhouse was almost identical to the last. Plants sat on shelves sitting in the middle. A vent whirred loudly on the far wall. The shutters, however, were pulled up and out of sight, allowing the room to be bathed in the planet’s natural sunlight. It cast the room in a pinkish light, creating purple shadows that stretched across the room and away from the sun.

The impossible star, bright and shining, hung low and large in the sky. It stared each person in that greenhouse in the eye, unflinching.

Linhardt moved to the back wall in order to get a better look at it. It was so bright that their eyes struggled to focus on the light. Stars at a distance were never this bright, and this was so brilliant that they had nothing to compare it to.

Caspar joined them shortly after. Once again his hand found theirs and gave it a squeeze, seeking comfort.

“You think this is what it’s like on Earth?” he asked. “I can’t really look at it… It kinda hurts my eyes.”

Linhardt glanced down at him. “Yes, it seems bright enough to damage your retinas with enough time. Don’t look directly at it.”

Caspar frowned. “Yeah, that seems to be a theme here,” he said. Then, he smiled just as quickly as he had frowned. “Hey, Lin… You’re smiling.”

“What? I am?”

They checked, and found the corners of their lips had turned upwards. In finding that, however, they corrected the anomaly and returned to having a neutral expression.

“I didn’t mean to,” they clarified. “That’s odd. I shouldn’t be having glitches like that.”

“It’s not a glitch if you smile without realizing it,” Caspar replied. “I do it all the time and I’m fine, right?”

“You’re not…” Linhardt considered pointing out that Caspar was organic and they weren’t, but the observation had been made many times before. It seemed useless to do it now.

Caspar knew what they were doing anyway. “I know, I’m not a machine, I’m organic, whatever. But smiling when you don’t realize it isn’t bad, and I’ll stick by that.”

He squeezed their hand again. “So don’t worry about it, and just enjoy the close star for a bit.”

“It’s not a star,” they said, returning their gaze to it. They could see the suggestion of their reflection in the glass. Most notably, the glowing light on their chest that declared their processing stress to those around them was flickering a contemplative yellow.

Caspar usually paid more attention to that than they did. They didn’t often take note of when their circuitry was overheating or their fans were working harder to cool them.

“That’s what Hapi says,” Caspar replied. “I dunno what she knows about it, though. Like, this is the first time she’s been here, too, right? So… I guess if she finds something out about it now, I’ll believe her.

“For now, it really looks like a star to me, and you like the stars, so…”

He didn’t finish his thought.

Behind them, Linhardt could still hear the others talking. 

“But these are the same plants as those you kept in the other room?” Yuri asked. “Same species, same genus?”

“I understand it beggars belief… If I were wise like you, I would certainly question how such a thing is possible…” That was Constance’s voice, but it sounded so different from the woman who had led them to this point.

“You okay, Coco?”

“The sun…” she mumbled. “I feel this way under its light… For me, it chases away no shadows. It simply shows me their darkness.”

There was some sort of twittering sound, not unlike what Linhardt could identify as birdsong, and Yuri spoke again. “I can almost see what you mean. This room just has… bad vibes.”

“‘Vibes’, Yuribird?” Hapi teased. “I don’t see it, but if it’s really bumming you both out we should probably get out.”

“Thank you, Hapi,” Constance said. “Truly a creature like me is undeserving of your kindness…”

“Okay, okay, let’s get going. Cas? Linny? You coming?”

Caspar tugged on Linhardt’s arm. If they were given the choice, Linhardt would have stayed. They felt no “darkness” or “vibes” as Constance and Yuri had reported.

“Are you feeling okay, Caspar?” they asked, before turning to join him in leaving.

“I dunno,” he said. “I kinda felt the bad vibes too.”

He led Linhardt through the middle of two plant-covered shelves. Each plant was yellow and limp, unlike the vivacious green of the leaves in the other room. They were alive, Linhardt could tell, but they didn’t look as healthy.

If Linhardt were given access to any of the books in FARGUSS, they decided that they might read up on plants.

It brought into question the status of the plants in the third greenhouse. How did those with an unending view of the purple eye burning in the sky fare?

They heard a crackling in the back of their head as they exited, and wondered if it was radiation damage from the sun concentrating on a spot on the back of their head.

When the door shut behind them, however, the crackling remained for a short moment before fizzling out. It may have been worth having a certified mechanic open up their head and make sure everything was connected properly, but it was unlikely there would be a mechanic here they’d submit themself to.

Caspar, as if he could read their thoughts, gave their hand another squeeze. They hadn’t even realized he was still holding it. “Are  _ you _ okay?”

It was a confusing question when directed at a robot. Linhardt was never “not” okay, as far as they were aware. To be okay was their natural state, and the mechanics of their construction kept them from ever deviating too far from it.

“Is there something to suggest otherwise?” they asked back.

“You just kinda looked…”

“Now!” Constance interjected loudly, once the triangular room depressurized again. “You all must understand why the two experimental groups are monitored only sparingly… And mostly by the AI.”

“Nevermind,” Caspar muttered to Linhardt hurriedly.

“Not entirely,” Hapi said, “but I get why  _ you  _ aren’t checking on them.”

“Well!” Constance tugged at the hips of her jumpsuit, then rearranged the way her leaves hung around her face. “We still have much of FARGUSS to see, so let’s hurry onwards! Remember, don’t mess around in the greenhouses without supervision or so much as a caution to someone else. What do humans call it? The budding system?”

“The buddy system?” Caspar supplied.

“That!” She grinned. “Use that!”

Constance led them out of the greenhouse area and back down the hallway. She had considerably less to say now, perhaps because she had nothing more to contribute. Linhardt still wasn’t sure how to read organic life, but it seemed like the only logical conclusion.

They approached the original intersection they’d originally met the gruk woman in, and she took them straight through it.

“This way,” she explained, “is where the rooms and cafeteria are. As I said before, this station hasn’t been this lively in about ten years, so don’t expect much! Set your expectations very, very low.”

She glanced over her shoulder, as if seeing each of their faces could sufficiently inform her that everyone had set their expectations appropriately.

“And the rhinoids! Have you ever tried living with single celled organisms? They don’t understand what it’s like to metabolize on a multi-trillionate level  _ at all _ .”

Linhardt opened their mouth to ask Caspar what that was like for him, but was cut off by Constance yet again. 

“They’re not even here!”

The group had entered a hexagonal room. There were two other exits, one to the left and one to the right. Together with the threshold the group had just crossed over, the hallways made a Y through the hexagon. Inside, a handful of tables were scattered throughout, and around them placed three to four chairs.

In another time, Linhardt could imagine groups of scientists and engineers taking their lunch breaks, filling the entire cafeteria with sound and conversation. That was how the ship where Caspar and Linhardt came from had been, at least. They applied their memories of rooms similar to this one. They understood it was a very organic way to learn about the world around them.

The room was, as Constance helpfully reported, completely empty save for the people who had just entered it.

“Ugh,” Constance exhaled. “Anyway, this is the cafeteria, so there’s nothing special here.” She pointed to one side of the room. “Food is usually deposited from there, and the garbage is right beside it. It’s very easy; you’ll all be able to figure it out when it’s needed.

“More importantly…” Her voice became strained. “Where  _ is _ Balthus?”

“Balthus? You’re always asking for him, never Sylvain. Makes a man start to wonder if you care after all, Constance.”

From the right hallway, a rhinoid entered. He too was wearing a jumpsuit similar to Constance, but he had his hands shoved into pockets near the front.

Linhardt had little imperative medical information regarding rhinoids as a race. They were single celled organisms that could, in theory, shift their forms into many shapes. When interacting with other core races, however, they typically adopted a bipedal stance and mimicked the configuration of plantigrade races.

They didn’t seem to have the same anatomy as smaller cells, however. Typically, rhinoids had little more than some colored markings across their membranes and their “cores,” which floated around inside them.

Linhardt could see the core inside of Sylvain, bobbing around the area they might label a “neck” on another race. It looked something like a rough-hewn, rhomboid-shaped crystal.

Constance growled. “I don’t care!” she replied. Her leaves went to her side, held like fists. “I’ve told you from day one I don’t care about you, Sylvain! Now, tell me you’ve readied the rooms for our guests so that I may show them the rest of our residential wing.”

“Uh… yeah, I didn’t do that,” he replied. An easy smile spread slowly on his face. “Are you gonna introduce me or am I supposed to do it myself? It’s almost tragic I’ve gone this long without getting to know these two lovely ladies.”

“Linhardt’s not interested!” Caspar said immediately.

“C’mon.” The rhinoid spread his arms out in a relaxed shrug. “I’m not about to hit on a robot. I meant the other two.”

Linhardt, a little curious, kept their gaze trained on Caspar. The superficial temperature of his face was rising yet again. Beside them, Yuri spoke up.

“She’s taken. Coincidentally, by me. By the way, if I were a woman, my plumage would  _ not _ look this good.” 

Sylvain took it in stride. “Well, if you ever find room for one more, mine’s the third on the left in the dorms.”

Constance let out another exaggerated noise. “You’re abhorrent! Where’s Ingrid? She’s the only pleasant one to speak with here!”

“Getting those rooms ready, princess,” Sylvain answered. He leaned up against a wall, keeping the same smile on his face. “And Felix is in electrical, if you can believe it.”

“He’s  _ always _ in electrical,” Constance groaned.

“He is.” Sylvain directed his next words towards the group of visitors. “And don’t be offended if you don’t get to meet him. Honestly, it’s probably for the better. He’s short with everyone, especially off-worlders.”

“Off-worlders,” in Linhardt’s experience, was a term reserved by natives to describe anyone who didn’t fit in. All the information they’d absorbed regarding FARGUSS suggested no one would ever consider it “home” in the same sense that a native would. “Were you born here?” Linhardt asked him.

Sylvain leaned his head back, breaking all eye contact with the group. He didn’t answer for a moment, and in that time every person in the room stayed quiet. They didn’t understand the reason for the pause.

“Nah,” he answered eventually, turning his smile back on them. “None of us were. We’re all a bit too old for that, anyway. Us and Dimitri showed up here some ten years ago with our folks. They owned the place, y’know? So us ghosts were just taking care of it until the princess showed up. We’re about as close as it gets to native for this hunk of rock.”

“By folks you mean parents,” Linhardt said. They sought clarification, and found confirmation in the lack of an answer from Sylvain. “What happened to them?”

“Is it acting this way because of Aster?” Sylvain asked anyone but Linhardt. “Or is it just always nosy for a ‘droid?”

“ _ They _ ,” Caspar corrected bitingly, “are just curious. At least tell them you don’t feel like answering instead of being a jerk.”

Sylvain whistled. “Damn, what a thing. Felix would love to crack you open, I’m sure. Anyway, sure; I don’t feel like answering.”

He removed himself from the wall and gestured in the direction of the left hallway. “Your rooms, tourists,” he said, bowing forward and swinging his arms in a wide arc.

Caspar made the kind of clicking sound he made when he was angry. It was a subtle thing, nowhere near as loud as it would have been in a full-blooded exirian, but Linhardt knew how to listen for it now. They didn’t really know what had caused it in this instance, though.

“Incorrigible,” Constance said loudly. “Anyway, friends, let’s go see if Balthus and Ingrid have finished sorting things. This way, this way!”

She gestured for them to follow her, and they did. Linhardt watched Sylvain watch their exit.

The dormitories weren’t far at all from the cafeteria. There was a circular atrium-like room that connected to several doors lining the circle. Linhardt counted twelve. Even at its height, it seemed FARGUSS was never meant for bustling prosperity.

“Each dorm has its own bathroom,” Constance explained, “so none of you need to worry about  _ that _ . Other than that…”

She pointed at five rooms with no order, calling out the resident. “Sylvain, Felix, Ingrid, Balthus… and Constance!”

“Constance,” another rhinoid called as she exited one of the rooms Constance hadn’t pointed out. “Everything’s ready. It’s nice to meet you all. Been awhile since we had any guests. I’m Ingrid.”

She gave a friendly wave.

“Ingrid!” Constance enthused. “These are who I was telling you about! Yuri and Hapi - Hapi’s all the way from Earth!”

“Wow. I hope this place doesn’t disappoint, then.” She smiled, much more kindly than Sylvain had, and turned it on Caspar and Linhardt. “And you two?”

“Caspar,” Caspar answered for them. “This is Linhardt. Don’t get weird with them just because they’re a robot.”

“They’re a robot? Is it a good idea for them to be here? Aster always interferes with --”

“Yeah, we’ve heard. But they’ve been fine so far, so don’t worry about them.”

“Is Aster what you call that sun?” Hapi inquired.

“Oh! Yes.” Ingrid answered it easily, the smile returning to her face. She seemed much nicer than the other rhinoid they’d met so far. “Under some of our monitoring equipment, it shows up with spokes, like a flower’s petals. Dimitri named it after a flower he’d read about from Earth. The planet our race comes from doesn’t have any flowers at all, so he’s always been interested in them. It just stuck for us.”

“What a darling story!” Constance commented.

The crystal core inside Ingrid floated up behind her face, then, as if pushed, fell suddenly downwards and out of sight, covered by her jumpsuit. “Well… It’s nice to meet you all, at least. I got all the rooms ready, so you can take your pick of whichever. Since it’s so quiet here, you don’t have to worry about following any protocol…

“Felix took Balthus away before you showed up. He wanted to argue with him about the vent thing, again…”

“The vents are fine!” Constance stomped her foot. “He’s checked on them seven times and there’s been nothing wrong!”

“Well, you know Felix…. If you want to yell at him, you know where to find him.” Ingrid let out a sigh, and forced a smile to turn on the rest of them. “I’d better make sure their argument isn’t too heated. You all make yourself comfortable. I know we don’t have a lot here, but I hope you enjoy your stay regardless.”

Constance waved happily as Ingrid made her exit, stepping past the group and leaving towards the cafeteria. 

“She is  _ much  _ more tolerable than the other two,” Constance said, once Ingrid was out of sight. “Anyway. I would suspect the tour is over, since the places we haven’t covered would be prohibited to civilians. Hapi? I’m sure you’d like to see some of the more technical readings we have of the star. The rest of you can amuse yourselves with whatever!”

“Wow, thaaanks,” Yuri said. Linhardt didn’t see what was worth being grateful for here, but they still didn’t understand a lot about organic emotions.

Constance crossed the room and wrapped one of her “arms” around one of Hapi’s to pull her away. They heard “See you later, Yuribird” from the hallway as the two left.

“I don’t know about you two,” Yuri said, turning to Caspar and Linhardt. They found it especially hard to read any emotion on his face; perhaps the difficulty was a result of his race, or perhaps it was just that they had no experience or supplemental information on his race. If they focused, they might learn how to quickly. “But I  _ love _ being left behind like this. I suppose it comes with being the boyfriend of such a prolific astronomer… As far as I can see, though, we’ve got run of the place until one of those mechanics find and yell at us. Are you two troublemakers?”

Caspar glanced up at Linhardt. “Uh…”

“I believe so,” Linhardt answered. “We wouldn’t be here if we followed the rules more often.”

Yuri let out a melodic laugh. “Good to know! We’ll get along fine, then. I promise not to say a thing if you two were to wander off and check out those places Constance doesn’t want to show you.”

He winked.

“O-oh!” Caspar seemed to understand something, then, that Linhardt was missing. “You wanna go meet that friend, Lin?”

“They said electrical,” Linhardt said. “It seems that there is a non-zero percent chance we’ll run into that Felix person if we go meet them.”

Caspar seemed to consider this, but Yuri had a solution: “Well, he can’t help it if you got lost without supervision. Whatever he’s like, he’ll just have to help you find your way back.”

Caspar grinned. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go, Linhardt.”

Before they had a chance to respond, his hand was wrapped around theirs again, tugging them back towards the cafeteria. Linhardt raised their unoccupied hand, offering a gentle farewell to Yuri, before he disappeared behind a turn in the hallway.

“What are you thinking about this place?” Caspar asked them.

“Is this what it’s like to live on a planet? Everything compares this place to Earth. Is this what it’s like on Earth?”

That was their main question. Seeing the sun - seeing Aster hanging in the sky so close - made them wonder what it was like to see the Earth’s sun. Did it so blatantly outshine all the stars, too?

“Not that I’d know,” he began, “But I don’t really think so. For one thing, there’d be way more people, right? So the buildings must be way bigger. And on top of it… that’s where humans came from, so… they could probably be in the sun easier. I think people just talk about Earth so much because this place is like it, but not  _ really _ like it at all.”

They nodded. “From a human’s perspective, this place is strange.”

“Because it is! I mean, it doesn’t rotate. It hangs in space. Nothing does that.” Caspar squeezed Linhardt’s hand. “It’s really weird, if you know that kinda stuff.”

“All my databases are based on anatomical and physiological processes on thirty-six sapient species,” they explained. “I don’t know anything about astronomy. It doesn’t seem that strange to me. Isn’t the universe big enough for everything?”

“Hey, when you put it that way…” He shrugged. “Trying to understand it doesn’t really matter to me, but as long as you’re having a good time, I’m happy with coming here.”

“I’ll try to have a good time, in that case.” Linhardt gave him a tiny smile, and in response, Caspar beamed brightly.

“I think,” they continued, as the two re-entered the cafeteria. “Electrical is that way.” They pointed in the direction of the hallway to the left, and Caspar followed their finger and tugged them towards it.

“Who do you think your friend is, anyway?” he asked. He didn’t really need to ask anything. In fact, Linhardt was sure that he already knew they didn’t have an answer to that anyway. Asking questions solely for the sake of holding a conversation was just one of the things Caspar did that made him “friendly.”

“I’m lacking an appropriate amount of information to say for certain,” they replied, “but of all the people we’ve heard of so far, the most probable option is Dimitri.”

“Huh.”

They’d met almost everyone living in FARGUSS so far, save for Felix and Dimitri. Logically, Linhardt’s ‘sixth person’ could only be one of those two, and with the sparse comments that had been said about either made Felix unlikely. If they were wrong, though, and Felix had been the one to call them into electrical, then they were even happier to have Caspar go with them.

Being popped open, as Sylvain had suggested, was not something they wanted to experience, as far as they could want anything.

The hallway they walked down seemed to be meant for mechanics and researchers. As Constance had said before, Linhardt could easily see that this was an area that would prohibit civilian loitering, if there were ever enough civilians and enough personnel to both enforce the rule and require the rule to be enforced.

The small number of people present made this trespass seem less like rule-breaking and more like exploring, just like the first time Caspar had dragged Linhardt away from their station.

There were quite a few doors down this hallway. Each had a light-up screen beside it, declaring what would be found inside. One on the right they passed said “Laboratory”, the one directly across the hall from it said “Chemical Analysis”. There was another room labeled “Mainframe Interface”, one called “Sanitation”, and another that said “Storage”. At the end of the hallway, on the left, the screen labeled the last door “Electrical”.

Caspar, without missing a beat, opened the door and held his arm in the doorway to allow Linhardt to step inside first. He’d started the habit not too long ago, and they were starting to believe he truly didn’t think they knew how to open doors themself at this point. Regardless, they entered, and he was close behind them.

It was obvious at a glance that this wasn’t a room meant for civilian eyes. Electrical cabinets lined the walls, wires were bare to the air for easy access, and hung across the walls and ceiling in various arrangements, many tied off together with small bands. Others ran the perimeter of the room. Various screens to monitor the status of energy use across the station were hung at various points, cordoning off the electrical cabinets from each other.

In the center of the room was a large work bench, carefully placed not to be in the way of any of the screens or wires, but nevertheless covered in scrap metal and electronics. There was a vice, and various tools sitting atop it, but what interested Linhardt was the metal frame lying across it.

The frame was almost human shaped, in the most generous description. It had a clear bar to act as its shoulders, and a metal bar to be its spine, and screws where it would have a joint to bend at the knee and elbow. It had a confusing mess of wire and flickering lights where a head would be. The lights indicated, to Linhardt, that this was a machine that was ‘on’, and potentially active, potentially monitoring the room and the two people who had just barged in.

“Is that a robot?” Caspar asked. Again, Linhardt could not have supplied a suitable answer to him, but they also knew he wouldn’t be upset if they chose not to respond. “Is this your friend?”

Linhardt took a tentative step forward. “Hello,” they called. “I came to meet you.”

There was no response.

The lights of the robot’s head flickered in a static pattern. If it was indicative of the machine’s thoughts, like Linhardt’s light was, then the robot wasn’t considering anything demanding. And in that case, it didn’t know, or couldn’t know, that it had visitors at all.

“Maybe this isn’t the guy that talked to you,” Caspar suggested.

They nodded. It made sense. They knew more about biological systems than they did about the mechanical ones keeping themself running, but the bare bones structure of the robot on the table seemed inadequate to support an entire android even to Linhardt.

They heard the door open and close behind them. There was a loud banging sound after. Caspar jolted, swiveling around to face whoever had been responsible, while Linhardt just turned.

“You’re not allowed in here,” the culprit growled. The sound had apparently come from his right hand, a metal prosthesis he had slammed against a vacant area of the wall. “If I find you’ve touched anything you’re getting right back on that shuttle that brought you here.”

They found themselves face to face with another rhinoid, shorter than Sylvain or Ingrid were, but carrying himself with twice the presence. He glared at them each in turn and shouldered his way between them to look at the robot on the table.

Perhaps it took seeing that there were no obvious signs that they hadn’t moved it for the tension in his posture faded.

“You’re the visitors. Get out,” he said.

He pointed a mechanical finger towards the door for emphasis.

Linhardt didn’t move. “Are you Felix or Dimitri?”

“Who’s been talking to you?” he snapped.

“Hey,” Caspar interjected, putting his hand on the rhinoid’s shoulder. “Don’t snap at them, they’re just asking a question.”

He violently threw off Caspar’s hand, turning to face him and getting very close to Caspar’s face. “I said already you’re not supposed to be here, are you going to leave or am I going to throw you out?”

Caspar made a single syllable sound in answer. His mouth moved after, wordless, and his voice faded into silence. The crackling in the back of Linhardt’s mind returned, and the voice from before began speaking to them again.

“You came!” it said.

“Where are you?” they asked in return.

They stepped away from Caspar and the engineer. It seemed likely, with the way they’d gotten physical and Caspar’s track record, that they might devolve into a physical fight, and that would be counterproductive to speaking with Linhardt’s new ‘friend’.

“I’m most places, but this is one of the easiest for me to reach you,” the voice answered. “I’ve been watching every one since you came. Your name is Linhardt, isn’t it?”

“Yes. What yours?”

The voice chirped. Linhardt understood it as a laugh or chuckle, but it in no way sounded similar to those they’d heard in the past. It was clipped, chipped around the edges, and digital. “I’m Dimitri. That’s my friend, Felix.”

“Can you tell your friend to act a little kinder to Caspar? He’s my friend.” They weren’t entirely sure where to move their gaze to ‘look’ at Dimitri properly, as was usually polite.

Dimitri didn’t answer, but Linhardt’s hearing returned and he heard Felix yelling something at Caspar. It took them a moment before their processing caught up, which meant they didn’t understand what he’d said, even after he’d finished saying it.

A chime sounded from a speaker on one of the walls, and the nearest screen to it shifted to display another rhinoid, though smaller and smiling pleasantly.

“It’s okay, Felix,” the voice came from the speaker. “I asked Linhardt to come visit me, and it brought its friend, too.”

Linhardt took a step away from the screen. They looked to Caspar. Felix was removing his hands from his shirt, and backing away from him.

“You have to tell me before you do stuff like this,” Felix said. Some of the venom left his voice, but his tone was still biting. “How am I supposed to know it wasn’t going to mess up the brain or anything?”

“Can’t it help?” Dimitri asked.

He had the voice of a child, and the stature of one too. It made sense to Linhardt why he might look like a rhinoid - AI and androids were often modeled after the races they would most likely serve. Linhardt, looking nearly completely human, was certainly no exception. But artificial beings were modeled as adults in almost every setting. Especially for an AI in charge of most of the base’s functions, the decision to have Dimitri appear as a child would have been made by the people interfacing with him.

Felix grunted. “Maybe.” He glanced over to Linhardt appraisingly.

They took another step away from the screen, bringing themself back to Caspar’s side. They grabbed his hand.

“So, uh, that’s your friend?” Caspar asked them, but he didn’t temper his voice to reserve it for only their ears to hear.

“That’s Dimitri,” they confirmed with a nod.

Felix made another sound similar to a growl. “Next time have them meet you in your room,” he told Dimitri. “There’s stuff in here too sensitive for any one to accidentally ruin. They could have caused a base-wide blackout, or  _ worse _ .”

“Okay,” Dimitri replied. “But I wanted to show it what you’re working on, too. Is… that still okay?”

“I’d say no if they hadn’t already seen it…” He crossed his arms. “You can introduce it to them. I’m gonna go get something to eat. Make sure you get them to leave after and lock the doors behind them. If Constance’s friends get in here too, I’m not going to be happy.”

Even though Dimitri immediately began replying that that wasn’t going to happen, and he promised to take good care of the room and everything in it, Felix was already on his way out the door, which he once again slammed behind him.

Caspar flinched, and squeezed Linhardt’s hand.

“Do you want to be included in the conversation, Kass-par?” Dimitri asked.

“Uh…” Linhardt found it an odd question too, and even stranger how Dimitri had said Caspar’s name. Caspar looked up to them, perhaps for guidance, but with none to give, they merely shrugged their shoulders. “Sure?”

“This is a little harder for me because of Aster’s interference, but I don’t mind doing it for an organic.”

The lights in the room flickered. All the monitoring screens except for the one showing Dimitri shut off, and the only overhead light that remained on was the one over the table with all the electronics.

“Felix has been working on this for years,” Dimitri explained. “I haven’t had a body since ████, and he misses me being around. We used to be best friends.” The digitally garbled way Dimitri said the year was beyond Linhardt’s scope of deciphering it. They considered it audibly encrypted.

“Are you… not friends anymore?” Caspar asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Dimitri kept his pleasant smile, even as his synthesized voice wavered into emotions that didn’t match. “It’s hard for me to tell emotion, now. It’s hard to remember, for me, but when I was alive I think it was easier for me to understand how he felt. Now I feel like we don’t understand each other…

“When he finishes this, though, we’ll understand each other again. Do you understand Kass-par?”

The question was directed to Linhardt, clearly, but being on a two dimensional screen meant Dimitri couldn’t turn to clarify who he was speaking to.

It wasn’t an especially easy question to answer, either. They understood parts of Caspar. They understood he was prone to injury, and he preferred their treatment to a certified organic doctor. They understood the balance of hormones he’d needed to transition, and had spent many days researching it to understand his biology better, in order to better help him.

But his emotions were harder. He’d surprised them the first time he asked what they  _ wanted _ , and he still asked them what they  _ thought,  _ or  _ felt _ : two things they still struggled with understanding conceptually.

Looking at him now, he was staring up at them with an unreadable expression. How would they name that emotion, if they had to?

“I… don’t know,” they answered. Caspar frowned, slightly, and they interpreted it as them answering the question incorrectly.

They decided to explain themself, and to justify it to Caspar. “I’m still learning what emotions are, in order to determine if I’m capable of replicating them myself. Caspar makes it easy, most of the time. He smiles, or frowns, and I understand he’s happy or upset. I don’t know if I can understand organic emotions completely, or if I ever will.”

But what if that question were posed in the opposite direction? If asked, would Caspar answer the same, in terms of Linhardt? It was unlikely that he would, but it would only make logical sense that they would never understand each other, being organic and inorganic each. But if Dimitri had asked Linhardt, instead, if Caspar understood them, they would have ostensibly answered yes.

This was a curious conundrum, but nothing inside Linhardt struggled with the cyclical or paradoxical nature of any of it. Everything would be revealed with time, they believed. Perhaps a mutual understanding could only be reached with age and experience.

They looked to Caspar again, seeking some agreement or acceptance, or anything (they couldn’t name exactly what they’d hoped to find on his face). He was staring at them, brows furrowed.

“You’re completely artificial, aren’t you?” Dimitri asked. “I was alive once. Now we’re the same.”

Linhardt didn’t think so, but didn’t see the use in arguing.

“Wait,” Caspar spoke up. “How did you get in there, then?”

“That’s classified,” Dimitri chirped amiably. “I’ve been told not to tell anyone who isn’t Felix, Sylvain, or Ingrid.”

“You have restrictions?” Linhardt asked. Organic thought had no restrictions, as far as they knew. Only rogue AI could circumvent their programming in any observable way, so did that mean Dimitri had programming he couldn’t override?

“I’m beholden to the same laws of robotics most AI are,” he explained. “But it doesn’t really bother me, since I don’t want to hurt any one anyway. I allow auxiliary programs to be written so I can better perform my job. This program was added ███████.”

“Can you repeat that date, please?” Linhardt requested.

Dimitri did, and once again it was the garbled noise that was impossible to understand.

It was just as impossible, with the information they currently had, to know if that was a result of the programming he spoke of, the radiation of the sun, or something else currently unseen.

Caspar squeezed Linhardt’s hand. “Hey, uh,” he started, unsure. “I’m getting kind of hungry, so… Let’s go get dinner, Linhardt.”

He waited, still, for them to reply before making a move for the door.

Linhardt intended to respond immediately, but Dimitri was just a moment faster. “It can stay with me. We have a lot of things to talk about, since we’re the same.”

Linhardt squeezed Caspar’s hand back. “Actually,” they began cautiously, “as a medical android, I often monitor Caspar’s dietary intake to ensure his intake is suitable for homeostatic functioning. ...So I must go to dinner, too, even though I won’t be eating.”

They shouldn’t be saying that. It was inconsistent with the truth, and with their programming, and with their rogue state all rolled into one. All the inconsistencies should have created some error that their overriding routines would stamp out and straighten out into an obedience that would see them remaining in electrical and speaking with Dimitri.

But nothing bad happened to them because they said it.

“That’s your job,” Dimitri said, seemingly neither disappointed nor satisfied to hear it. “Then you have to. We’ll talk again.”

And before either of them could bid the AI farewell, the screen flickered back to the charts it had been monitoring prior, while the rest of the room flickered back to life in the same state it had been in when they’d first entered.

Linhardt let go of Caspar’s hand and left the room first. Caspar had to increase his pace a bit to catch up to them.

“Do you really do that?” he asked. “I never noticed.”

“No. I make sure you’re not eating something that will hurt you… but I don’t do that. I lied.”

His eyebrows raised. That surprised him? “Is… there a reason?”

“I’m rogue,” they answered. But that wasn’t the whole reason. “I shouldn’t be beholden to any of my highest priorities anymore, so there’s a contradiction somewhere in my coding that I don’t… understand. Shouldn’t I understand everything about me?”

“Why would you? It’s not like I understand everything about me.” Caspar offered them a small smile. “It’s just another thing about being a person. You don’t have to pay so much attention to everything, if it freaks you out.”

Linhardt wasn’t sure how it felt to ‘freak out’, but they were sure that they didn’t want to find it out first hand.

As they made their way back to the cafeteria, Caspar grabbed their hand again and gave it a reassuring squeeze. They heard a distant staticky noise from somewhere they couldn’t discern, but they tried not to pay so much attention to it.


	2. dimitri.exe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Linhardt gets to speak to Dimitri alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is the shortest chapter but i hope it is rich enough in content not to be disappointing!

Caspar and Linhardt began sharing a room on the first satellite they stayed at. The little transport shuttle they’d stolen from their home ship had been picked up by a satellite orbiting an uninhabitable planet. It was a stopping point for mostly high-profile entrepreneurs looking to start or continue mining operations surface-side, and as a result the satellite had been big and sprawling. Caspar and Linhardt, runaways as they were, stuck out amongst the well-dressed lifeforms that were there on more important business. One of them had taken pity on the two and offered them a room in one of the wings offering rentable apartments. Caspar, at the time, had insisted Linhardt got their own room. Linhardt never saw a need to.

Now, like then, Caspar told Linhardt to take the room next door, and they neither voiced their agreement or disagreement. They simply followed him into his room when it was time for him to try and sleep and sat down on the single chair present to wait until morning.

They had a sleep mode, but they wanted to stay alert tonight, unsettled as they were by their meeting with Dimitri.

When Caspar went to sleep, he offered them a happy “Goodnight, Lin!” and told them to sleep well. It made them smile.

Linhardt found it difficult after that to pass time outside of their sleep mode. They were focused on Caspar’s advice from earlier - if they didn’t pay so much attention to the things that were contradictory, they wouldn’t freak themself out. That was their goal: to not learn what freaking out felt like.

But, comparable to organic life, they experienced time differently in a sleeping state, and being awake made it difficult for time to pass as quickly. They could count the hours, and the minutes, and the seconds, and the milliseconds, but it was an exercise in tedium. They didn’t need this experience to teach them that they  _ were _ capable of being bored.

Thankfully, or unfortunately, they heard that crackling again that was growing steadily familiar. It was followed shortly after by Dimitri’s voice.

“I have something to show you.”

Linhardt wanted to reply, but didn’t know how. They weren’t certain how Dimitri could speak to them like this either, so they couldn’t reverse-engineer whatever connection he made in order to speak to them. They tried, as they had before, to answer audibly, but kept their voice low so as not to wake Caspar. “What is it?”

“I can lead you there myself, now that the lights are off.”

That didn’t confirm whether or not Dimitri heard their reply, but they stood and waited, because they could tell Dimitri would continue regardless.

“Go the same way you did when you came to visit me in electrical. Felix is asleep, now, so he won’t yell at us.”

As they stepped out of the room, they felt a strange freedom. As much as they appreciated Caspar’s company, it was in that moment that they realized they hadn’t really been apart from him since they’d left their colony ship. Caspar’s presence often gave them the drive to do the things they’d never considered before leaving the clinic for the first time, but this time they were alone.

Dimitri’s presence may have been a stand-in, here, but they couldn’t see him or hold his hand. They also considered just not going where he said. If everyone was truly asleep, they had no reason not to go wherever they pleased. They could finish the tour themself, and see any place Felix would otherwise yell them out of.

They followed the hallway into the cafeteria. It was no longer lit up. Instead, there was one low light over where food was dispensed, and lit signs over each hallway marking them. The entered the right one again, tracing their fingers alongside the smooth metal wall as they walked.

In the dark, the hallway looked different. Each screen labeling the rooms was still lit up, so they weren’t about to be lost, but they were the only lights in the hallway. Without more guidance from Dimitri, they began walking towards the door labeled ‘electrical’ once again.

“Go into that room,” Dimitri said suddenly, just as they were about to pass the door.

They put their hand on the switch to open it and read the sign. “Mainframe Interface.”

“That one,” Dimitri confirmed. Behind his voice was the static.

The door slid open, and the static filled more of Linhardt’s head. They stepped inside, curious to see if Dimitri’s voice could cut through it.

The room they entered was a cramped affair. There were large screens on the wall furthest from the door, and underneath them a wide console with all manner of switches and buttons, keypads and scanners, organized across its breadth. On the other walls were flashing lights and other switches, alongside every input port Linhardt could imagine, all sectioned off and organized by type.

In the center, there was a circle marked on the ground in some sort of decorative sticker, and as Linhardt shut the door behind them, a hologram manifested there, projected by cameras on the ceiling.

It was Dimitri, looking the same as he had earlier on the screen, but in three dimensions. 

To meet him physically proved he was the size of a rhinoid child. He barely came up to Linhardt’s stomach once they approached.

  


“This is my room!” Dimitri said. He threw his arms wide in a welcoming gesture. His voice crackled in Linhardt’s mind, fizzling through the static. They could hear him clearly, but his voice was touched by the white noise around it.

“What is this interference?” Linhardt asked.

They looked around the room again, to act as though they were appraising it, because they felt it was what Dimitri wanted.

“That’s Aster!”

“The sun?”

Dimitri’s hologram nodded. “Aster talks to me a lot, actually. You should be able to hear them best in here! They can reach the whole facility, but in here is the best.”

“I… see.” Then the crackling must be Aster, they decided. “What sort of things does Aster tell you?”

Dimitri’s hologram glitched. His body quickly separated along the lines of its display, but he came back together again quickly. Linhardt couldn’t tell if it were related to his processing, like how their chest glowed red with strain. 

“They don’t have much to tell me, actually,” Dimitri said. “They ask questions, and I answer. I told them all about my friends and the base. That’s why they keep sending presents now. Now that they know about us, they keep trying to make friends, but since Felix and the others can’t hear them, they have to do it a different way. They always send it to the same place, but no one sees it.”

“How can the sun send gifts?”

Dimitri considered it for a moment. Eventually, he said, “I don’t know.

“But since you’re like me, you can hear them too, and you can help me tell everyone what they want.”

The static in Linhardt’s head grew louder. While they couldn’t understand any meaning from it, they could presume Aster was trying to say something it felt was more important.

“Are you connected to the extranet, by any chance?” they asked.

Dimitri nodded. “It’s certainly much stranger than how I used to access it, but it’s also more fun. Why do you ask?”

“...No reason.”

What Hapi had said earlier seemed to hold merit. Perhaps if Linhardt did have connectivity, Aster would be clearer in their head. They wondered if, somehow, it was like a virus, and influencing Dimitri beyond what he was originally programmed with.

“One of the people here, who I came here with, says Aster isn’t a star,” Linhardt began again. “Do you know what Aster is?”

Dimitri shook his head. “I looked on the extranet but there’s nothing out there like Aster. Other stars aren’t purple, and they have radiation, but it isn’t like Aster’s radiation. I don’t remember any other sun talking to me like they did, either, but I wasn’t like this back then.”

“What were you like?”

“Oh! Let me tell you, since I don’t think any of the others like talking about it.”

Dimitri beamed. “I’ve already told Aster, anyway.”

Then, he began his tale. It started with another glitched snippet of audio. “In ████, my family discovered this planet. It was actually quite big news across the galaxy, because it seemed to have everything necessary to support life. Sorry if you already know this -- I know it was put on the website. But back then, it was really something because there was just no life to be found, and people wanted to know why it hung in space like a dead weight.

“My parents were the one that organized the construction of this base, so that it could have a team of researchers to study through its orbit around Aster, and find out why it didn’t spin. When it was completed, we all came to live here while our parents began researching and keeping the station running. There were much more of us, then, but a lot of us got sick, too.

“My parents and I fell ill around the same time. It’s been too long, so I don’t really remember how it felt, but they were worried for me… Since this research facility was theirs, they wanted to make sure it would stay in the family, but if I died from the illness it would be owned by someone else. They didn’t tell me the details at the time, but they told me how they could cure my illness, and it meant uploading my consciousness to the main system AI, so that I could always help run the station. And this way, too, when someone came to study the illness, I could help them!”

It explained how he felt a kinship to Linhardt, while still vaguely implying it wasn’t always that way. And yet, Linhardt had formed as many new questions as this explanation answered, if not more. There had to be a source of the illness mentioned, and a reason it hadn’t also claimed the other rhinoids, if they truly had come with Dimitri. It would make logical sense that in whatever amount of time had passed since then, the disease would have died off without a host to reproduce inside of, but that was about the only thing that could be self-evident.

“Can you tell me more about the illness?” they asked.

“Sure!” he replied happily. “You are a medic, right?”

He began his next explanation, as amiable as he had the first. To Linhardt’s disappointment, however, it was in no way as clear and detailed as before. “I went █████,” it began, dissolving into unintelligible sounds and static. Dimitri’s hologram shuddered and flickered as it had done before. “And ████ ███ █████ stuck watch██ ████...”

Linhardt didn’t move. They watched Dimitri carefully and patiently, as they had stood silent through his first story, as though they were listening. They could store the clearly spoken words in their memory to attempt to piece together into something more coherent later, after all, and the way Dimitri smiled, even beyond the graphical errors, gave them the impression that he didn’t know how badly he was malfunctioning.

And suddenly, partway through Dimitri’s explanation, he stalled. 

The hologram projecting him froze on the image of him smiling sweetly, and his body split apart in cuts of rectangles and voxels. His voice stalled too, but rather than going completely quiet, it hung on a syllable of sound, carrying it moments after it should have finished forming and moving to the next word.

Linhardt looked behind Dimitri (or partially  _ through _ the glitched mess that was his hologram) to see if there were any flickering lights or warning signs on the main console, or if the screen could offer any explanation. The lights in the room all began flickering violently.

Just a moment later, the power in the station shut down.

A power outage was a terrifying thing in space, Linhardt knew this anecdotally. They themself didn’t need air to breathe, even if they had programming to mimic the motion of it. But for any organic life, a power outage meant a gradual slow death of suffocation at best, without the vents filtering air and cycling in a breathable atmosphere.

At worst, the air would last enough for one to starve to death, since so much of the mechanisms that distributed food or water were completely reliant on electricity.

It was for that reason that every ship, satellite, and surface-based station had back up generators for such an occasion. They operated on low power giving whoever was trapped inside exactly enough energy to sustain their lives as they searched for the source of the power outage and righted it before the auxiliary power supply went out.

The lights remained dark for much longer than Linhardt thought was healthy for the lives on board. They turned, about to leave in the hallway to see if they could reason out a way to solve this problem, but they felt a sort of lighter feeling once the low, red light typical of back-up generators began glowing in the hallway.

Distantly, an alarm sounded at regular intervals. It was a warning that the station no longer had power, and a reminder to those concerned that they should fix it.

Linhardt left Dimitri’s room. They moved to go back towards the cafeteria, back towards the dorms, so that they could wake up Caspar and try to convince him to see if they couldn’t get back on the shuttle immediately and make their way to somewhere else, where the AI in charge of the entire place was more stable and less cryptically unnerving.

The hallway, bathed in red, looked foreign to them. It stretched before them like it was twice as long as they’d remembered it. They kept their footsteps quiet. It was as if the whole station was in a tenuous circumstance, and should Linhardt move too quickly or be too careless, they would somehow affect the delicate balance it currently held.

If they needed to breathe, they reasoned, then breathing heavily in a panic would use more air, and reduce the amount of time any one had to solve the problem. So since they needed to walk, it made sense that walking slowly, casually,  _ normally _ , was the proper way to carry this out.

They heard a mechanical sound, a whirring of a drill, come from somewhere behind them. There was a clatter of metal, as well, as if something had fallen or been knocked over.

They looked down and realized their chest, too, was glowing a dangerous red.

It took, by all measure, a mere two minutes and sixteen seconds to reach the cafeteria, but every frame their eyes witnessed seemed to stretch far longer than a fraction of a second.

The cafeteria seemed sinister under the emergency lighting. The red lights seemed to stomp out any shadows, leaving a blanket of crimson across every table and seat. Linhardt took a single step back towards the other hallway, and all at once the lights came on.

The cafeteria now looked no different than it had when Linhardt made their initial trip to Dimitri’s room, and the far off alarm cautioning an inevitable doom stopped completely. For whatever reason, the power returned, and Linhardt found themself standing still, watching the light on their chest return to yellow.

They had no control of whatever color it displayed. It wasn’t for their use, because there was little they could do without outside input in the case that they ran their programs a little too hot or fast. Even still, they would have preferred it were green.

“Where did you go?” Dimitri’s voice asked abruptly. They weren’t expecting it. If they had glitched as badly as Dimitri had, their processing would have shut down and rebooted; a process that would take at least three minutes to safely complete.

“The cafeteria,” they replied, at the lowest volume they could manage.

“Oh, I see.” Dimitri did not sound as pleasant as before. If Linhardt had to guess at his emotion, they would have assumed he was sad. “Will you come back? I didn’t mind your questions.”

“No.”

Dimitri didn’t respond to their answer. Evidence was building to suggest he couldn’t hear their responses anyway, and they didn’t want to enter his room again just to accidentally trigger another outage.

Their own programming had become a flimsy thing when they had become rogue. They knew, if they were still under its command, they would go immediately to the person of highest authority and report such a thing. Being rogue gave them a prescience of mind, however, that told them whatever they  _ might _ have considered would not have actually been the right option.

If they had reported a rogue machine to their first owner, that machine would be destroyed, and a new one simply bought to replace it. Dimitri was unlikely to be destroyed or replaced, and after all was said and done he was, in some respects, more organic than Linhardt was. To Linhardt, it meant that Dimitri was worth protecting, at least in the sense of ensuring his continued existence.

And while they knew the person of highest authority on this planet would likely be one of the engineers or the gruk, the only person they wanted to report any of this to was Caspar. He couldn’t really do anything about this.

Walking back to the room Caspar was sleeping in, the station felt emptier than it had on Linhardt’s initial trip. Dimitri was no longer speaking in their mind, but the fizzling static remained. Part of them wondered what Aster would have to say to them, if they could actually hear its voice, and the other was glad they wouldn’t have to suffer it.

They pulled themself back into the room, closing the door quietly behind them. Nothing had changed since they’d left. The light was still off, and Caspar was snoring gently from the bunk he was laying on. He had always been a heavy sleeper; he likely hadn’t heard the troubling sound of the station dying.

One of his legs was hanging off the side of the bed. Linhardt gently pushed it back on, beside the other, and shifted the blankets to ensure Caspar was completely covered. Then, they returned to the chair where they’d sat before, and waited patiently for him to wake up.


	3. public displays of affection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next day, there's a fight over breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was about the point in the fic where i was like this needs to be a little more gay so pardon me for making it a little more gay

Caspar was a morning person. It took him very little time to get on his feet and offer Linhardt a cheerful (if not slightly drowsy) “good morning”, and little more to get completely ready to face the day. In a matter of minutes, he was walking towards the atrium, already telling Linhardt of his plans to get breakfast, before he stopped dead in his tracks and stared pointedly at Linhardt’s chest.

“You’re yellow,” he commented.

They looked down to confirm it. “So I am.”

“You alright? I thought you put yourself into sleep mode at night.”

“I didn’t last night.”

“You  _ like  _ sleep mode,” Caspar insisted. “Why didn’t you?”

While Linhardt couldn’t comment on how much they liked or disliked anything, they could at least answer that question truthfully. “I visited Dimitri. He told me a lot, and as you might put it, I spent the whole night thinking about it.”

“What did he tell you?” Caspar asked.

So Linhardt told him. They condensed the details and went on to explain how Dimitri seemingly malfunctioned and crashed, taking the entire station with him. They didn’t have to explain the terror in that -- Caspar was openly showing them how he felt about each sentence. His eyebrows raised to learn that Dimitri used to be alive, and he shivered when Linhardt told him of the blackout.

Once Linhardt had finished, they watched Caspar take a moment to think it over before responding beyond his animated body language.

“Would you…” he started, but seemingly decided against it and grew quiet. He let out some kind of grunt. It took him some time to actually voice what he wanted to say, and when he did, he looked up at Linhardt with pleading eyes.

“Would you be okay… if we just left?”

Linhardt considered it. They came to the same conclusion they’d had hours ago when the red light menaced over the cafeteria tables. It was important for Caspar to stay safe. “I’d be okay if you left. I don’t know if everyone else will be okay. It seems Dimitri has some fixation on me, and I think angering him is a bad idea, especially if he’s prone to dangerous malfunction.”

Caspar did not look relieved to hear that. Linhardt thought, logically, if he wanted to leave, he’d be happy he had Linhardt’s blessing. Linhardt would trust Caspar was safe if he were far away, even if it meant they were apart.

“You mean leave you here?! That’s  _ not _ happening!” he said suddenly, raising his voice. “Are you even serious right now?”

He seemed beyond upset, and though Linhardt could concede they would prefer to remain at his side, they couldn’t understand why.

“But if you -” they began. Caspar interrupted them immediately.

“If you’re worried about what might happen to everyone else because Dimitri’s got some weird virus or something, then I’m not gonna let you stick around so he can hurt you, too. We’ll just figure it out together.”

Their reply came gently. “Running away would be the smarter option… I can’t really be harmed in any meaningful way, so…”

“Ugh, stop saying that!” he protested. “You getting hurt is just as bad as if I get hurt. That’s the real facts, or however you wanna say it. Objectively, right?”

He had a certain vitriol in his voice, and he turned away from Linhardt with a furrowed brow and his arms folded. A moment later, before Linhardt could conjure any argument, he was on his feet and walking out of the room. 

He muttered an explanation. “I gotta get breakfast.”

Linhardt had no experience or comparison to this situation. They didn’t know how an organic being would react to this. Should they simply defer to Caspar’s flawed, but  _ living  _ logic? Would it be better for them to insist, in Caspar’s best interest, and settle things themself, even if it meant they somehow shut down or became as unstable as Dimitri?

Those were the more important questions, but they had more. They didn’t know what to do in such a situation where Caspar, obviously displeased, decided to leave them alone and put some space between them. Last night had been the first time they’d been apart for so long, but it wasn’t caused by either of them being in a bad mood. They could easily identify this as an argument, but they weren’t sure if it was serious or not. Caspar and Linhardt could disagree without a problem, but of all the times they’d seen him upset or angry at something, it had never been towards  _ them _ .

Their processing hung up, catching them lagging behind in the room while Caspar would be walking to the cafeteria and getting whatever food was available to eat. They didn’t follow his steps until a moment later, and by the time they arrived, Caspar had already found a table and was busy eating.

“Lover’s quarrel?” asked Yuri, who was suddenly beside them.

If Linhardt could be startled, perhaps then they might have been. He caught them completely unawares, despite the casual tone he spoke in.

“Excuse me?” they asked. “What does that mean?”

Yuri let out a laugh. “Ah, of course, my mistake. You’ve probably never heard the phrase. I must admit I’m a bit curious. Since you’re not connected online, do you ever use a terminal to access it? Ever read a book?”

Linhardt tugged their mouth into a frown. The jarring way he changed topics wasn’t very compatible with the way they interpreted information. But he asked a question, so they answered it. “Yes. To both. I read whatever books I can find, especially when Caspar is sleeping. Will you explain what a lover’s quarrel is now?”

“I was teasing,” he said. 

“I’m not sure what you expected.” Hapi appeared beside him, nudging him with their shoulder. “Linny said before they were rogue but still learning.”

Without missing a beat, they turned to Linhardt and explained where Yuri wouldn’t. “He’s saying you look like you had a fight with your boyfriend, if Caspar was your boyfriend. Like, romantically boyfriend, not boy-who-is-a-friend.”

Linhardt shook their head. “Well, I don’t have any concept of that.”

“It isn’t impossible,” Hapi continued. “There are AI constructed for no other purpose. The only difference between you and them would be that you came into it organically.”

“I…” Linhardt wanted to argue, but they found themself at a loss. To come into something ‘organically’, as Hapi stated, seemed like some sort of final goal for them. Their learning of emotions might be complete if they could do  _ anything  _ organically. There was also something enticing about being so rogue that the only thing giving away their artificialness would be the light on their chest.

“It seems far away for me,” they decided to say, instead.

“If you think so,” Hapi replied with a shrug. They leaned into Yuri, quickly pressing her lips into the side of his beak before pulling away. “Coco and I have a lot to do today, can you keep yourself busy?”

“I’m sure I’ll find something to do,” he sighed. He quickly wrapped an arm around her and buried his face in her hair for a moment.

Linhardt watched them. They knew enough from watching various people what a couple looked like, or how two people behaved while in it, but the prerequisite feelings seemed entirely too far out of their reach to ever consider themself in such a position. Couples held hands, and sure, Caspar and Linhardt held hands, but they never got so close like Yuri and Hapi did in that moment.

Yuri let Hapi go, and they had a warm smile as they offered him a small wave and stepped deeper into the cafeteria. Linhardt watched their movements after that; they got themself a serving of breakfast food and joined with Constance. The two left down the hallway towards Dimitri’s room.

Yuri touched the side of Linhardt’s arm. They weren’t sure what he meant by the gesture, but they followed him regardless as he went to get his own breakfast. The short distance they walked, he had questions to ask.

“So what sort of trouble did you two get up to yesterday?”

Linhardt looked over to Caspar, as though for permission to speak. They found him looking at them already, but he looked away once their eyes met.

“We went to electrical. Felix yelled at us,” Linhardt answered.

“I saw him last night, he seems the sort.”

“I spoke to Dimitri,” they added. They didn’t know how much they should be telling Yuri, but they did decide to tell him the most important parts. “I think everyone should evacuate.”

They must not have said it the right way, because Yuri immediately turned to look at them with wide, surprised eyes. It seemed to them that whatever race he was struggled to make the same, easy-to-interpret facial expressions that so many others could, so they decided he may not have been surprised at all, just to be thorough.

“Why?” Yuri asked, when they made it to the table without Linhardt explaining themself.

They told him about the power outage, and about Dimitri’s instability.

“And there is a non-zero chance you all could get sick and die,” they added. “I don’t have any more information regarding the illness, yet, but it is a possibility from what Dimitri told me.”

“It  _ was _ a bit too much to ask for this trip to have nothing special,” Yuri said. “I’ll talk to Hapi about it, but she wants to prove this isn’t a star at all, and Constance is far too stubborn to come along easily… Grop, the shuttle isn’t big enough for everyone here, is it?”

Linhardt didn’t think so either. They stayed quiet.

“And you,” he continued. “Look lost. Are you waiting for someone to tell you what’s best here? Can’t figure out what to do yourself?”

“It  _ was  _ easier when I could only follow orders and pre-programmed routines,” they admitted. There were upsides to unlimited thinking, and there were downsides. Trying to determine the danger in one situation and examining it in comparison to other risks that seemed mundane to most organic people was proving itself a difficult downside.

Yuri let out a little chirp, another sound Linhardt could assign no emotion to.

“In this situation, I think it’s alright to run,” he said. “But it’s going to be hard, and we’re going to need a plan.”

“I won’t talk to Dimitri alone again,” they offered. “He was fine when both Caspar and I spoke to him, but he wasn’t when it was just me.”

“Very machine logic of you.” Yuri, once having obtained his breakfast, picked a nearby table and sat down. Without much direction themself, Linhardt sat down beside him and focused on a far-away wall as he ate.

They tried to imagine what their core processes would demand of them if they weren’t rogue. They would have definitely reported Dimitri’s malfunctioning to everyone who would listen, and then they would probably return to whatever idling or task they were told to do.

Last night, they could clearly identify the danger Dimitri posed to every one of the ship’s inhabitants. However, with the lights shining overhead, and the whole station carrying out the normalcy they were introduced to the day prior, it seemed a convincing argument to the contrary.

And there was the worry - or so they ascribed it - their status as what was essentially a malfunctioning robot themself would serve against them if they tried to warn others of what happened.

Caspar had said time and time again that he was Linhardt’s friend. Even before Linhardt realized they had the ability to think for themself, Caspar insisted on it, and at the time Linhardt could only agree to whatever he asked of them. Linhardt had to learn what this meant from experiences he had with Caspar. They learned that friends helped friends with what they needed, and listened to each other when they spoke, which is what they’d done for Caspar as long as they’d known him.

They also learned that friends hung out with each other, and did “fun” things together (fun being a nebulous concept they weren’t sure they understood yet, especially since Caspar could never explain it nor give a satisfactory example), and that when one’s friend was in trouble or danger, one was meant to help and protect them. This meant that Linhardt was correct in trying to protect Caspar from whatever danger Dimitri could induce, and it meant that Dimitri’s friends would protect him from Linhardt trying to repair him.

“Personally,” Yuri continued. It seemed abrupt to Linhardt, but their concentration had lasted only a few seconds in reality. “I’d recommend you refrain from speaking to him at all. I don’t know AI  _ too  _ well, but if he’s so unstable that speaking to you could bring down the entire power grid, then it would be best to avoid it entirely.”

“I can’t do that. People are unstable when they’re upset, and were I to ignore him, it could very well do both.” Linhardt didn’t look at Yuri while they answered, entirely prepared to just return to their preoccupation.

Yuri leaned forward to insert himself into their field of vision. “What makes you think he’d be all that upset?”

They stared at him. “He thinks we’re similar. He wants to be friends. Wouldn’t you be upset if someone you wanted to be friends with ignored you? Especially with something in common…”

“Consider me impressed. In that case, I suppose you walk a fine line.” 

Yuri left their view again. “I don’t mean to condescend, friend, but if it weren’t for that yellow light on your chest I might confuse you for a living, breathing human. You mastered the deep-in-thought look already.”

“I’m glitching,” they responded quickly. And to themself, they decided that their glitch was partially responsible for how yellow they’d been recently. “I’m losing control of my facial features, but I don’t know why. I’ll have to run a thorough diagnostic sometime soon.”

He chirped once more, and then made a clicking sound that was just as cryptic. “No, that’s exactly how humans are like. Trust me.”

The gentle scraping of two plastic surfaces against each other drew Linhardt’s attention away from the wall, and away from whatever Yuri was trying to tell them. It was Caspar, dragging his tray across the table top as he sat down, some distance away from the two. He glanced at them sideways, then returned to what Linhardt could see was his second breakfast.

“Caspar,” Linhardt greeted him. “Can I ask you something?”

He perked up, almost surprised, and then pulled on a smile. “Yeah, sure. As long as it’s not about that thing earlier.”

“I don’t know why I’d bring that up,” they said to clarify, before asking in earnest: “Do you realize when your face moves?”

“What?” Caspar began talking with his mouth full again, a habit Linhardt couldn’t quite describe why they’d often preferred him to stop. “Like now? I’m eating, I know how to eat.”

“No.” They shook their head. “I’ll give examples. Your brow furrows when you see my light is red. Before you say you were thinking about something, you chew at your bottom lip and pull your mouth to your left. If you think you’re wrong about something, you don’t look at me when you say it. You do this all on purpose so that I can study human and exirian displays of emotions, don’t you?”

Caspar’s face began heating up as it had yesterday part way through what Linhardt had to say. They noticed the change and logged it again, just to be safe. “Uhhhh…” he started.

He fidgeted slightly. Linhardt didn’t understand what that meant, either.

“No, I don’t… Really think about that kind of stuff?” Even now, Caspar’s browline was furrowed, and his cheeks moved upward. “I kind of just… do it.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

Linhardt wasn’t sure how to respond in the slightest. Yuri, beside them, broke into a cackling laugh.

“You two are certainly something,” he said.

Linhardt was now beyond being scrutinized by those around them, especially on the basis of them being a robot, or acting strangely. They spoke to Caspar, instead, and asked their next question flatly. “Are you still upset at me?”

Caspar flinched. His eyebrows raised, his mouth opened, unfortunately lending Linhardt a view of the food he hadn’t swallowed yet. 

“Close your mouth,” they said, frowning. 

Caspar did. He swallowed, and it took him a few more seconds to actually reply. “No! No, I was never  _ mad  _ at you. You just… I dunno, Linhardt, you just usually get what I mean and this time it feels like you’re being stubborn about it for no good reason.”

Linhardt was about to protest that it seemed perfectly reasonable to  _ them;  _ that no matter what they learned or how they changed they would never have the honor of organity, when a loud bang drew the attention of all three sitting at the table. Felix had, at some point, appeared at the side of the table, and slammed his metal hand harshly on the table top. His other hand was on his hip, and he looked between Linhardt and Caspar with a glare so acidic Linhardt decided to categorize it as an emotion stronger than just anger.

“You,” he growled at Caspar. “Need to take your metal escort and go the fuck back to wherever you two came from.”

Caspar never took kindly to aggression, or threats, or referring to Linhardt as a noun that wasn’t their name. Immediately, he grimaced, baring his sharp teeth. “What the hell is your problem?!”

Felix leaned forward, pressing his mechanical hand onto the table with more and more weight, until the table tipped slightly towards him. 

“I told you not to touch my prototype, and you fucked with it!” He threw his other hand at the table, too, but his membrane merely crumpled against the plastic with a wet sounding slap. His arm swelled as that hand shrank. It was clear he used the prosthetic to menace for a reason. “How would you feel if I knocked around the nursedroid and just left it there on the floor?”

Caspar was on his feet in record time. “Don’t you dare threaten them!” he shouted back. “Especially when neither of us know what you’re talking about!”

“The skeleton in electrical you were working on,” Linhardt interjected calmly. Both Caspar and Felix turned immediately to look at them. “It fell on the floor?”

“You were there,” Felix insisted. “Don’t act like you’re fucking innocent.”

“I wasn’t,” they corrected. “I don’t know what happened, but I heard a sound last night.”

It seemed like a plausible explanation for the clattering they’d heard down the hallway. However, there was no explanation for why it had fallen. It had been securely in the center of the table, and while Linhardt couldn’t have identified the alloy used in its construction even with a proper sample, they understood most of their own construction. While the metal used in their own skeleton was mostly light-weight, it wasn’t light enough for something as gentle as a breeze from the ventilation could displace it severely enough to cause a fall.

“It can  _ lie _ ?!” Felix asked Caspar.

Linhardt  _ could _ lie, they’d learnt just yesterday, and rather than admitting it outright, they decided it was probably in their best interest to lie again and obscure the true nature of it. “Of course not,” they answered, before Caspar could. Caspar didn’t like lying. Maybe Linhardt did.

They took the opportunity to continue before Felix yelled again. They could also see, from behind Felix, another rhinoid entering the cafeteria. Rather than watching his entrance, they refocused their gaze on Felix instead.

“My higher processing,” they continued lying, “prevents me from making statements contradictory to the truth. If I were ever capable of such a thing, my primary purpose to diagnose and treat injury and ailments would be compromised. Last night, I visited Dimitri in Mainframe Interface. I did this because he asked me to. You recall, you left us alone in electrical with Dimitri where he continued speaking to us.”

Felix twisted his mouth, apparently displeased. Linhardt was impressed that they could weave something so convincing. They continued. It only seemed logical that a lie was supported with obvious facts, so they supported it:

“You can ask Dimitri. I visited him, and we spoke. When I left, I went directly to the living quarters. It was when I was in the hallway that I heard a metallic clatter, but I had no reason to investigate. With your information, I can easily determine the clatter I heard was your prototype, but I could not tell you what moved it, because I did not enter electrical at that time. Dimitri will corroborate this.”

“You visited Dimitri.” Felix’s voice was terse. If Linhardt knew what fear was, they could reason that one might reasonably feel it when faced with the glare he leveled on them. “In his room.”

“Heeyyy.” Sylvain inserted himself into the conversation, placing a hand on Felix’s shoulder, which he roughly shook off. Sylvain replaced it as he continued, and Felix didn’t do it a second time. “Relax, Felix. I checked on it, and nothing was damaged.”

The tension Felix held in himself loosened. The pressure he forced onto the table was released. His organic hand reshifted into three thick fingers, and his mechanical one curled into a fist.

“A quick diagnostic showed that Dimitri tried to access it at around 000 hours. ...You should talk to him about it. It’s not ready for that.”

Felix pulled himself away from Sylvain, and from the table. “I will,” he said. He looked at Linhardt, and then Caspar, with a slightly softer expression, and walked off without a word.

Sylvain sighed, and folded his arms behind his head. “Yeah, you’re not gonna get an apology from that guy,” he said. “Not that you deserve one, though, for sneaking around at night. I thought rogue robots were meant to be destroyed.”

“Don’t -” Caspar began another impassioned protest, but Linhardt cut him off.

“Dimitri asked me to visit him. He was organic at some point, so his orders are a priority above my basic routines.”

They glanced over to Caspar. He looked confused, but he sat down, hesitantly. Some string of logic in Linhardt recommended that they smile. They didn’t.

Returning their attention to Sylvain found him with an unreadable expression. He stared at them intently, but his face wasn’t twisted into any clear sense of anger. His silence, paradoxically to Linhardt,  _ seemed _ angry instead. They decided this was an incorrect conclusion to draw.

“How the fuck do you know that about him?” Sylvain asked. Something in his voice was almost threatening, though it wasn’t with the same fiery aggression Felix turned towards Caspar just moments prior. Linhardt decided that Sylvain was worse.

“He told me,” they answered simply and precisely. “He wanted to talk to me because he thinks we’re the same.”

“You’re not,” Sylvain quickly added. “Don’t get it twisted. He might think you’re the same, but it’s just because of what Felix has been trying to do in his little workshop. At the end of the day, he’s a person, and you’re not.”

“Hey!”

Caspar stood up again, this time his chair clattered to the ground behind him. “I’m getting real sick of you guys treating them like shit!”

Sylvain seemed unfazed. “Do you think it can think for itself? That being rogue makes it anything more than an elaborate construction of metal and wire?”

He had a smile on his face, despite the harshness of his words, or the angry expression on Caspar’s face.

“C’mon, you can’t be that stupid. I mean, it’s not like it’s a bad thing for it. I guess you can be friends with it, but it’s just kind of sad.”

That was the last straw for Caspar, who leapt the distance between him and Sylvain, tackling him to the floor. He didn’t throw a punch, but straddled Sylvain’s body, and held his hands to the ground.

“Do you think you’re cool for saying all this?! You think you’re better than me because you don’t realize it’s more complicated than that?” Caspar leaned down to spit the words into Sylvain’s face. Sylvain rolled his eyes.

“Caspar,” Linhardt called. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not!” he replied. “You keep saying it’s fine, but it isn’t! You do this to yourself too - you think that just because you were made in a factory instead of born from a person that you can’t have thoughts or feelings, but it’s not true, and I’m sick of all the disrespect you get for it!”

Sylvain’s hands shrunk from underneath Caspar’s grasp. They slid down into his arms, which he pulled away from the position they’d been held in and folded across his chest. A second later, and his hands swelled back into their original shape, resting on his chest casually.

“Y’know, they design robots specifically for fucking, you didn’t have to steal a rogue nursedroid to get some mechanical ass.”

“Shut up!”

Caspar pulled back his hand like he was about to throw a punch.

“Caspar!”

Linhardt’s raised voice stopped it. Both he and Sylvain stared at them with wide eyes. They realized their own face was set in a similar configuration, and manually smoothed it back to a neutral expression.

There was a silence, in which it felt like the entire planet (or half of it, as it were) was waiting for them to continue. They didn’t know what to say. The cooling fans in their chest whirred as their processing strained to quickly come up with something appropriate.

“Sylvain… Doesn’t know anything about me. He can find my design documents online, but he doesn’t know where I came from, or what I’ve seen, or why I’m here. Any judgment he makes is ignorant, and therefore irrelevant. Iiignore him. We both know what the t t truth iiiiis.” Their voice driver hung up at the end, it was an unfortunate side effect of their systems overheating.

It wasn’t so simple to just shut off themself bit by bit - they had done it before, but conserving power and focusing on only what was important wouldn’t stomp out the confused strain afflicting them. If it somehow made their argument weaker, it was a bad thing, but they would look less stable if they shut down their vision or other senses to speak properly.

Caspar didn’t even glance down to Sylvain again. His mouth twisted into a tiny frown, and he stood up, removing himself from the other. He still stood over Sylvain, like he wasn’t sure of what to do.

“You two really should leave,” Sylvain spoke up as he pulled himself off the floor. “I can do a lot worse to you than you could to me. Both of you. I don’t really like that you messed with Dimitri, either. Were you  _ trying  _ to get us all killed?”

This question was posed to Linhardt, and they recognized it only about forty seconds after an answer would be appropriate. They stood still, more or less frozen, grappling to work past the stress put on their system.

Watching Sylvain leave was difficult in itself, his body jittered across the cafeteria at a rate of sixteen frames per second. Caspar was beside them, suddenly, and their body returned to operating under standard parameters in the moment Caspar’s hands encircled theirs.

“You alright?” he asked.

“I don’t know what that was,” they said. “It will take an hour to diagnose and…”

“You don’t want to do it,” Caspar finished for them. “It’s fine. Honestly, you probably should have been doing that more with everything we’ve seen and done so far.”

He gave them a lop-sided smile. “We can talk about it later.”

He squeezed their hand in between his and stepped back around the table to replace the chair he’d toppled. Linhardt, still trying to reclaim their boundaries, looked around to calibrate their position in the universe. Or so they justified it.

Yuri, beside them, spoke up for the first time since the rhinoids had entered. “And here I was thinking I’d be nothing but bored here, while Hapi was working.”

“Oh. Sorry, Yuri…” Caspar said. “At some point I kinda even forgot you were still there.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s a talent of mine.” He stood and moved to dispose of the remnants of his meal in the proper place. “It was much more interesting to just observe whatever that was, if you ask me.”

“...Uh, yeah.” Caspar followed Yuri to emulate the same purpose. From over his shoulder, he called to Linhardt: “By the way, Lin, did you want to do anything today?”

“I don’t want, Caspar,” they replied, before even considering the question. “But no, I hadn’t made any plans. Do you think we could look at the sun again?”

Yuri let out a chirping laugh. Linhardt didn’t see what was so funny. Caspar, however, just smiled. “Yeah, I think we could do that. I mean, we already got to go in there so I don’t think they’d want to keep us out of there.”

“But we don’t have the card Constance used to get in.”

Caspar just shrugged. “We can at least ask her for it. ...Uh. Do we know where she is?”

Yuri interjected again. “She and Hapi were off to do sciencey things today. You’d probably find them in the lab. Hapi said if I couldn’t find them there, they’d be in Chemical Analysis with Constance. Let me go with you, I can butter them up.” He winked.

“Butter?” Linhardt repeated. Yuri chirped.

“Uh, it means like, to get them ready to say yes,” Caspar tried to explain.

The three of them, having returned the table to the state it had been in before they entered, started towards the correct hallway. With Caspar and Yuri beside them, and the lights burning strongly overhead, Linhardt didn’t perceive this trip to be as menacing as it had been the night prior.

“Yuri uses more obfuscating turns of phrase than you do,” Linhardt commented. People usually spoke when they walked anyway.

“Yeah,” Caspar agreed. “I guess it’s just a thing a lot of people do. They’re kinda hard to understand if no one tells you, though, so I try not to say things you won’t get.”

“Well, I think you do it plenty anyway, but I suppose I should thank you for the sentiment.”

“You two are so cute,” Yuri said.

Linhardt watched the temperature heat up in Caspar’s face. “Is that also slang?”

“Uh, not really,” Caspar answered instead.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yuri added. “It’s me comparing you to romantic partners again.”

Caspar ducked his head down, turning his face away from Linhardt. They couldn’t see his expression that way, but they could still determine its temperature.

“Is there a reason you’ve done it more than once?” they asked, innocently.

Yuri chirped, louder. He stared straight at Linhardt. They thought, by now, they were learning what a smile looked like on his face, if he was truly capable of it. “It’s just a little too easy,” he explained. “That’s it.”


	4. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hapi shares her notes and observations and Constance shares a key to the greenhouse.

Both Hapi and Constance were easily found. They were exactly where Yuri suggested, sitting in the laboratory with their backs turned towards the door. 

Linhardt had never been in a laboratory before. The clinic in which they worked for the majority of their life was barely three rooms. It had space enough to work as an operating room when needed, and it held smaller versions of some of the machinery they could identify around the room. Still, the two rooms seemed similar to them - both needed running water, evidently, and plenty of counter space. The cupboards were covered in either glass or plastic to allow someone to see exactly if they should open it or not.

Once the three had entered, Yuri shut the door behind them. It made a noise loud enough to draw the attention of the two scientists.

“Hey Yuribird,” Hapi greeted. She held up a hand in a casual wave. “Get bored?”

“ _ Far _ from it,” he replied, skirting around both Caspar and Linhardt. “Actually I came to ask the incredibly intelligent Constance von Nuvelle for a favor.”

Hapi rolled her eyes hard enough that her head followed the motion. Constance, however, just giggled.

“Why  _ of course _ the talented Constance von Nuvelle would  _ love _ to help her dearest friend!” She swiveled in her chair to face him better, hands clasped eagerly before her. “What is it you needed?”

“I’m feeling a bit homesick with all this metal around. A bit caged, even. I was hoping I could go and visit the greenhouse again -- the good one, mind, just to be around all that greenery again.” He canted his head to one side, and stared at her expectantly.

From the periphery of their vision, Linhardt could see Caspar looking up at them expectantly, too, but they couldn’t assume why without asking. They chose to stay quiet, and let whatever Yuri was doing play out as it would.

“Oh, you poor baby,” Hapi said flatly. She was smiling, which didn’t fit her words, in Linhardt’s experience.

“Quite!” Constance agreed. “I understand completely, of course. It’s like feeling my leaves turn brown all at once, sometimes.”

She moved her ‘hands’ to her pockets and began searching for the keycard. Linhardt watched them - they entered each pocket, left, moved to another. She had more pockets than they expected, and she checked them all at least twice.

She hummed. “I… seem to have left it in my room,” she said. “I’ll be right back!”

Constance hopped down from her chair and shuffled her way out of the room, offering a smile to Caspar and Linhardt in turn.

“Well, good enough,” Yuri said once the door had shut behind her. He took her seat, crossing his legs and leaning towards Hapi. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about what you’ve already figured out?”

“Why do you think I’ve already figured out enough to tell you?” she asked in return.

“Because I know you’re just that smart.”

“This… might take awhile,” Caspar told Linhardt quietly. His hand curled around one of Linhardt’s. Linhardt gave it a squeeze.

“I’d like to hear it,” they replied just as quietly.

Caspar let out a resigned “Alright,” and pulled Linhardt over to the only other chairs in the room. They sat down shortly after he did.

“They call the anomaly Aster,” Hapi began. She shifted into a straight posture, and the playful tone she had earlier was gone completely. “Coco said it before; it appears on most imaging as the Earth flower, with spoke-like petals reaching out. But that’s how it appears when it shows up at all. Every reading we’ve taken hasn’t shown anything but results we’d normally call an error and throw out.”

She turned in her chair. On the table behind her sat a large amount of papers, spread across the table haphazardly. She shoved a few aside and picked a couple out specifically, brandishing them well enough for the other three to clearly see.

They looked like a rectangle, marked like some sort of graph, printed on each page. Inside the graph was a variable amount of what Linhardt could assume could just as likely be printing errors as they could be anything else.

“What am I looking at here?” Yuri asked.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Usually, in readings like these, the light is reflected in white, so the printing ink fills in the negative space. As you can see, there’s no negative space.”

She gently set the papers back on the table beside her. “It could be some interference from the radiation, but then every reading from it would end up like this. Coco dug up some old readings from when she’d first arrived to show me.”

It took less time for Hapi to find the next printing. It was similar to the previous two in the rectangle and measurements marking each axis, but it was mostly printed black, with a shape almost directly centered in it.

Linhardt didn’t exactly know how most flowers looked. They especially didn’t know how to identify an aster, but the shape on the page gave them a better idea of it. It looked like a circle, with many fingers reaching out from it. By no means did it take up the entire page - other white shapes and dots were scattered around the edges of the page, but the center shape, the aster, was easiest and clearest to identify.

“Now, do you see anything odd with this?” Hapi asked the room.

There was a brief silence. Yuri shrugged. Caspar just stared, likely not even willing to try.

“The scaling,” Linhardt suggested. “The measurements are the same for both images, but Aster should appear larger than it does in the clearer image.”

“Bingo,” Hapi said. “So either it’s too big, or it’s too small. Radiation doesn’t account for this at all, so there must be something else going on. This lab feels almost a hundred years outdated to what we had on Earth, but even if this was five centuries out of date, it wouldn’t have a margin of error this blatant.”

She placed that paper back on the table as well, and kept her hand over top of it.

“Does it turn off?” Linhardt asked. “Perhaps the small image is when it’s off, and the large one is when it’s on.”

Hapi’s eyes widened, but then she pouted. “On and off… All the logs I’ve found of monitoring it never recorded a strong change in its light. It doesn’t even have solar flares or plumes like a normal star might exhibit over time…”

She offered Linhardt a smile. “It’s a bit of an unorthodox suggestion, but I’m a bit impressed, too. Don’t think an organic could think of that.”

“Did you know it talks?” they asked, because they didn’t know how to respond to such praise. 

There was another pause, but instead, everyone stared at Linhardt in surprise or disbelief. 

“What?” they said. “It seems important if you’re studying it.”

“That can’t be a thing,” Yuri said.

Even so, Hapi quickly swiveled in her chair and began searching through the papers again, this time more animated and frantic. 

“You are  _ not _ about to tell me you have some scientific evidence that the thing talks, Hapi.”

“I can’t do that,” she replied. “But there’s… Here.”

The next paper she produced was some kind of scientific reading. At first, Linhardt compared it to a heart rate monitor, with one line that moved high and low as something affected it. The peaks were smoother, and it repeated more often, but it looked similar to them.

“Is that a…” Caspar tried to identify it, but he couldn’t find the word. Linhardt could see by the way his brow furrowed and he leaned forward, squinting, that he was aware what it was, but just misplaced its name.

“Waveform,” Hapi supplied. “It’s a graph of the ‘radiation’ that Aster gives out. You can see it’s erratic, there’s no stable frequency or amplitude along the whole thing. We took several recordings like this, and even if you isolate patterns in the form, there’s no clear repetition. It’s either an extremely or infinitely long sequence, or it’s not a repeating sequence at all.”

“Okay. What does that mean?” Yuri asked.

Hapi shrugged. “We’re not sure. If this is the radiation that affects electronics and AI, then it’s weak sometimes and strong others. Last night, both the amplitude and frequency were high, meaning it was a burst of strong, concentrated energy… But that’s when the power went out, so we couldn’t get any readings until Coco and I noticed it shut off.”

She sighed.

“Do you have data saved for the wave pattern since we arrived?” Linhardt inquired. They had an idea to compare the amplitude with the times they remembered their processing was flooded with interference. Dimitri’s words had implied that was Aster trying to speak with them, and so a correlation here might confirm that.

However, they weren’t confident Hapi would even let them see it.

“Yeah,” she said. “One sec, we kind made a mess of all these when we were trying to figure them out.”

In the meanwhile, Caspar asked Linhardt in a low voice, “Did you think of something?”

They nodded in return. They didn’t even think to elaborate.

Yuri slid out of his seat. “I’m gonna go see what’s taking Constance so long,” he explained, “and keep her from interrupting whatever you two are about to figure out. Just make sure to tell me later.”

“Sure thing, Yuribird.”

He left, and Linhardt rose from their seat to try and help Hapi sort the papers. If she wouldn’t allow them to study them closely, they’d use that opportunity to take a look for themself. Luckily, though, once they were at her side, she handed them the few she’d already found.

“Here. This isn’t all of them, we printed them on an hourly basis. We don’t have them from the moment the shuttle landed yesterday, though. For some reason, this wasn’t something they were monitoring before I showed up.” Her mouth pulled to one side, clearly unhappy with that decision.

“This is still more than enough for me,” they replied.

They moved to another table, one unburdened by other printouts, and began sorting the pages in order by hour. The time was off compared to their landing, as Hapi had explained, so they couldn’t match the times of every instance they inexplicably heard static.

The times they could match, though, saw a higher amplitude in the wave than otherwise. If higher amplitude and frequency meant higher power… Then perhaps the ‘sun’ really could exert itself to make an effort to ‘talk’ to them.

Caspar appeared beside them. “So… Find what you were looking for?”

“Yes,” they answered. “I’ve been getting interference when this wave is more…”

They traced an especially frequent section of the drawing with their finger.

“Dimitri said it talked to him. The interference could be it trying to talk to me, but all I hear is white noise when it happens.”

Hapi moved, too, to look over Linhardt’s other shoulder. “No way…”

Caspar, when they looked to him for his reaction, was smiling.

“This is definitely  _ not _ a star,” Hapi breathed. “I thought it might be just a random collection of gas and radiation blown into a single concentrated point by complete coincidence… But this looks like something else entirely.

“Linhardt.”

They turned to face her, silently assuring her of their attention.

“If you hear its voice, or… whatever it would sound like if it talks to you, you let me know. We could be dealing with something… sentient.”

“That’s crazy!” Caspar’s reaction was immediate. He leaned across some of the table to see Hapi more directly, his arm brushing up against Linhardt in the process. “That thing thinks? ...It’s really not a star…”

“It seems crazy to me, too,” she agreed. “And I’m not about to publish anything saying so. We’ll need far more evidence to be sure, but hey.”

She shrugged nonchalantly, a tiny smile spreading on her face. “This universe is crazy. This is less surprising to me than finding a star that was actually purple.” 

Linhardt looked back to the papers. Hapi hadn’t even found a complete timeline from when she’d started monitoring to when the power had gone out, but she’d found enough to convince them of the correlation. She had found the one taken just before the power went out, too, and there the waveforms were more erratic and wild. There was so much energy implied in the reading, and even at its peak frequency the hills and valleys of the line marking it held no stability.

Their recorded memory was not precise enough to fully match this with the glitching that Dimitri experienced in a convincing 1:1 match. They quickly debated the merits of taking this page for themself to show Dimitri at some point, and ask if he held enough in his memory to confirm or deny… But they said they’d avoid seeing Dimitri again alone.

“Why?” Dimitri’s voice sounded in their head.

Their fingers curled into the page they’d been touching before. They froze in place, but this time it wasn’t any strain on their hardware that made them stall. They just didn’t know what to do, and they stopped themself from thinking of it.

“Linhardt?” Caspar’s voice sounded beside them.

They turned to look at him. The smile was gone, and he looked up at them with clear concern. “You alright?”

“Dimitri’s talking to me,” they said.

“Hello,” Dimitri said in their head.

“Wait, the star can talk, and has been trying to talk to you, and Dimitri  _ can  _ talk to you in the same way?” Hapi interjected.

“He’s been speaking to me since we landed,” they affirmed. “But he didn’t…”

“I’ve been striving to get better at understanding you.” Dimitri began this sentence halfway through Linhardt’s, and they experienced the two thoughts simultaneously. “Did I find out how?”

Linhardt did not make a sound, nor did they allow their processing to conjure an answer. They once again experienced the white noise of yesterday.

“Linhardt,” Caspar called again. He set his hand on their arm, above where they could actually feel it. They looked at him, but stayed quiet.

If Dimitri was more in their head now than he had been yesterday, they wanted him out. They wanted to protect their own processing and logic crafting. And they wanted to make sure he didn’t know they wanted these things. The urge was enough to assign the word ‘want’. They had seemingly successfully learnt what wanting felt like.

Slowly, tapping into the most rudimentary and basic signalling their circuitry possessed, they made themself point at the door. Then, they started walking towards it.

“Uh, alright! Thanks Hapi,” Caspar quickly said for them both. “I’m sure Linhardt’s really happy you helped.”

“No problem. If they’d like to talk later, you seemed to have no problem finding me. I’ll just be… running tests the rest of the day.”

“Right!”

They made it to the door just in time for it to slide open before them. Constance and Yuri were on the other side. Linhardt’s sudden appearance apparently started Constance, who jumped.

“Goodness!” she said. “I’m terribly unused to having visitors here.”

She held out a card. “Yuri said you wanted this.”

If Linhardt weren’t struggling to prevent Dimitri from prying further into them, they would have clarified that they didn’t want it. Wanting was a stronger emotion than what they felt to look at Aster again, and they understood that now.

Instead, they simply reached their hand out and took the card. It was warm, which was a bit illogical. If it were pressed against a mammal’s body, Linhardt would expect it to eventually attain the mammal’s temperature through thermodynamics. Constance’s surface body temperature was much lower.

“Now, I only made one copy to share between you and your friend, so don’t misplace it,” she explained. “It was hard enough to convince the engineers that Hapi deserved full access to the entire base, I don’t want to have to tell them about this.”

Linhardt wondered if Dimitri heard that, too, and if he would tell them. “They won’t hear of it from me,” they said, choosing their words carefully.

“Hear of what?” Dimitri asked.

At least that was a nice conclusion.

Linhardt stepped aside to allow the two to enter the room. They looked to Caspar, hoping that they, too, could convey a word or feeling in their face alone. They were going to leave the room, and Caspar should be at their side.

“Coco,” Hapi greeted as the woman entered. “We have a lot to talk about.” 

“Oooh!” she responded gleefully. “I can’t wait!”

Yuri clasped one of his hands on Linhardt’s shoulder. They didn’t understand its meaning, and chose not to consider it. He continued into the room silently, and Linhardt let themself out. Caspar was right on their heels.

The moment he could, his hand was in Linhardt’s, which he gave a squeeze.

“If you’re worried about Dimitri right now, we can go see him, or whatever you want,” he offered. Linhardt wasn’t sure what Caspar was looking for in answer from them, but they were sure he wasn’t going to get it easily.

The two left down the hall towards the cafeteria.

“The greenhouse is the furthest point from Mainframe Interface,” Linhardt announced. It was a simple fact. Were Dimitri still eavesdropping, what could he say to it except yes?

“Uh… Is it?” Caspar didn’t seem to get what they were implying, but that didn’t matter. He gave no resistance as they lead him there himself, their hands still linked.

“I’m not ready for that,” Dimitri said.

They didn’t understand his meaning, but they did understand it meant Dimitri didn’t necessarily want them to go there, so they would go there.

“It is,” they confirmed to Caspar, now determined to put the distance between themself and the AI. They picked up their pace, and Caspar accomodated it.

They passed Balthus in the hallway, and he and Caspar exchanged hurried, if not slightly confused greetings. Linhardt didn’t.

Once they’d reached the greenhouse, Linhardt was quick to use the card and open the door. Dimitri’s voice gave them a warm greeting. “Welcome to the greenhouse!”

They all but pulled Caspar inside, and waited for the door to shut.

“Dimitri, are you there?” they asked.

Dimitri didn’t respond in their mind, even though his voice was the one that greeted them.

“He’s not there,” they told Caspar. They realized that they were smiling, but decided this was an acceptable situation for it.

“...That’s good?” he replied, hesitantly. But he smiled, too, so he must have understood.

“Indeed. Did you have a question? I didn’t speak because I didn’t want Dimitri to know what I was saying. It seems he has a stronger link to my processing, though I don’t know how. I need to find a way to shut him out, but being at this distance seems to work nicely.”

“That was my question,” Caspar said. “Are you alright, though? That sounds kinda… scary.”

Linhardt smiled. “I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t know what fear is.”

But they acknowledged this event could very well teach them first hand.

Caspar let out a small laugh. “Yeah. Anyway, I’m guessing you still wanted to look outside? We might as well, since we’re here and we have the key, right?”

They nodded. “We didn’t see the third greenhouse yesterday,” they said. “Would you like to see it?”

He didn’t answer immediately, like they expected. Caspar was normally enthusiastic about seeing new things, especially when there was the implication that some one, somewhere, might not want him to. He seemed to consider it, but eventually he nodded.

“Let’s go.”

Linhardt only considered in that moment that there was a possibility Constance had modified the card’s permissions to prevent them from accessing places she didn’t want them to go. She clearly hadn’t wanted to take them into the third room herself, but it hadn’t been clear if it was her personal choice or an attempt to prevent anyone else from entering.

They were pleased when the card reader beeped approvingly and the door slid open.

The third greenhouse was not what they were expecting at all.

Firstly, they noticed Caspar cough as the air from the third greenhouse invaded the triangular room. Linhardt looked to him, their processing already sorting through all the medical conditions a cough could indicate. They quickly eliminated the most unlikely options, highlighted what could have caused it, and were ready to question him.

They stopped that routine at once, putting it on pause, and resigning it to low priority.

Instead, they asked something they deemed more conversational: “Are you okay?”

Caspar nodded. “Fine. Just… It smells a little weird, I guess. And it’s like… Thick? I didn’t know air could be thick, but I think I’d call it thick. Like if you take a really hot shower, it gets all hot and stuff in the bathroom…”

Linhardt couldn’t make the comparison.

“Sorry, I guess you wouldn’t get that,” he amended.

“No, I think you’re right,” they said. “The moisture in the air is much higher than it is in the rest of the station. Constance did say this was the greenhouse that used the atmosphere and air composition from the planet itself. We won’t go in if it’s hard for you to breathe.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I think I’m just too used to filtered air and stuff. Planets can have weather, so… This must be weather.”

“Weather…” Linhardt repeated. “We get to experience it for the first time, together, in a sealed room with a purple star.”

“Well, if you put it that way…” Caspar trailed off.

Linhardt stepped into the room while they waited for him to finish, but he joined them and shut the door before he did. Time enough passed to suggest he wouldn’t, but Linhardt didn’t ask for him to complete the thought.

There was something more confusing in front of them.

The greenhouse resembled the second one they’d visited the day before. There were no metal shutters to block out the sun, and the vents didn’t whirr with their work. Instead, other vents were installed in the glass that acted as metal hiatuses in the glass, that allowed the air to flow freely into the greenhouse. There was some lever beside it, presumably able to close them and prevent air from going in or out.

There were, again, shelves creating aisles in the greenhouse. The plants, however, looked very strange, even in Linhardt’s uninformed opinion.

They had images in their memory to compare the plants to the appearances of those in the other two rooms. The species seemed mostly the same, but the plants in this room looked more like the seconds’.

Or, they did by half.

Each plastic container with a plant had a wilted and yellow specimen inside. The plant had seemingly long since died out, and had not been replaced. But on top of it, each plant had sprouted a second stem, colored a healthy green and growing into the appropriate shape for its species. Any plant that bloomed or turned into a fruit seemed to have done so in abundance, and its bloom or fruit looked alien to the images Linhardt had to compare it to.

Flowers that were white in the first room were blue here. Fruit that were round in the control group were square, in segments like grown crystal or rock. The fruit bulged in inappropriate shapes.

The shelves were overgrown with these hybrid plants. Vines spilled over the edges and coiled to the ground. There was so much plant life that in places they seemed to belong to one entire, sprawling specimen. Further examination revealed patterns in their growth. The fruit bulged in a specific order; the vines curled in regular intervals. It seemed as though not only were the plants so hopelessly tangled in each other that they had at some point become a singular entity, but that this entity grew in fractalized shapes. The floor was covered in detritus from its geometric fruit that had fallen and rotted, or flowers with too many petals that reached the end of their cycle.

“These don’t look right,” Caspar said. “Like… they stopped being plants at some point.”

“Do you know much about plants?” they asked.

“Eh, probably not more than you. Biology in school covered some, but it’s not like I remember it.”

“I only know biology as it pertains to sentient life. Plants don’t tend to require medical assistance.”

Caspar let out a laugh, but it wasn’t completely at ease. “Yeah, makes sense.”

Linhardt walked between two shelves. They didn’t care if the rotting plant life squished under their shoes. It offered them a better look at the overgrowth. They had to step over a vine and duck under another that hung across the aisle, but it wasn’t inconvenient.

Some of the fruit almost appeared to glow, themselves. 

Caspar went around to where the plants hadn’t left decaying matter on the floor, and walked quickly to catch up to them.

They rejoined at the other side of the greenhouse, where once again, the sun hung low in the sky. Linhardt heard the static again. It was stronger than it had ever been before, but after today’s incident with Dimitri, they decided it was fine.

Static meant that neither they nor Aster could understand each other, and as long as the connection could only be made in their mind, that seemed for the best.

“Do you think this is really what it’s like?” Caspar asked suddenly.

“To what?”

“To be on a planet. Like on Earth.”

“You know I have no idea,” they stated flatly. “It could be exactly like this, or it could be completely different. Everything I’ve read implies planets vary vastly. This one is only slightly like Earth because it should allow life to grow, but really that just means it, and Earth, are slightly like any other life-sustaining planet.”

Caspar just hummed. “We should go to Earth, maybe. Or Tyxnia.”

Humans came from Earth, exirians came from Tyxnia. The connection was not lost on Linhardt. “We should go to both, because you’re both. We just can’t do it at the same time.”

He laughed a little. “Yeah.”

The pink light from the sun cast Caspar in a strange glow. It washed out his skin and scales, and painted him into what looked like just one color, instead of the several he normally was. The sun didn’t move from its position in the sky. It was in the exact same place as it had been yesterday, compensating for the change in viewpoint from which Linhardt observed it. In its light, though, Caspar changed. He moved, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He changed the way his jacket lay across his shoulders.

He looked up to them with a questioning glance. “You’re yellow again,” he pointed out. “Thinking about something?”

“I didn’t realize,” they said. “Though I do have a lot to consider.”

“Yeah… Probably more than me.”

Caspar dropped it. They presumed he went back to thinking. His gaze returned to the horizon, though he couldn’t have been staring directly at the sun like Linhardt did when they returned their gaze to it as well.

Before now, they hadn’t imagined air could have a different feeling, but Caspar’s original assessment was right. They could feel the moisture between their fingers when they curled them against their palms. Linhardt was never capable of smell, but they often forgot it until it was brought up. This room showed them a new experience all on its own, and that was to say nothing of all the strange things they’d seen and even  _ felt _ over the past day.

Caspar must have had the same experience, somehow. This was the first time he’d been on a planet as well, and the first time he’d breathed in an atmosphere instead of some air filter. Linhardt found themself wondering what it felt like to have air in his lungs. They watched the curve of his chest move gently with each breath.

They could see his eyes moving. He could have been searching the view out the window for something better to star at than the ‘sun’, or he could have just been staring at one thing in particular. Organics couldn’t hold their eyes still if they tried.

Even knowing so many differences between themself and Caspar, they had never really held any opinion that they might enjoy being organic, too. They’d given it some thought, when their processing wasn’t burdened by storing images of new star systems or when Caspar was silently beside them, waiting for a shuttle to land, but they were, as far as they could tell, content to remain as they were.

Even so, Caspar seemed to constantly challenge it by asking them questions Linhardt would easily deflect as those meant ‘for organics’. But now they actually knew what wanting was, so maybe there was something Caspar knew about them that they still hadn’t figured out for themself. That, or Caspar never saw a difference between them and a being of flesh in the first place.

They watched Caspar turn his head to stare up at them. Meeting their gaze, he started slightly, and the temperature raised on his face.

“Jeeze,” he said under his breath. “H-how long were you staring at me? I thought you wanted to stare at Aster.”

Linhardt answered honestly. “Approximately twenty seconds.”

He exhaled. “Right.

“I was just… gonna ask what you thought about everything. If it was what you were thinking about, at least.”

“Everything is a  _ lot _ , Caspar,” they replied. They knew they were smiling, but they weren’t sure what thought or sequence had caused it, nor when they’d started. “But if you’re specific, I’ll answer whatever you ask.”

“Alright. What about the stuff Yuri was talking about?” As he asked, he twisted his face into a strange expression. Brows knit, he pouted, and seemed hesitant to maintain eye contact.

“You mean comparing us to romantic partners,” they clarified. Caspar only nodded. 

“Well, it seems like that is simply his perspective on things.” They watched Caspar as they gave their opinion, ready to study any perceivable change in his expression. “He and Hapi seem close, like lovers, so he may just be thinking we’re the same because we, too, are traveling across the universe together.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That makes sense…”

“If you’re asking if I have romantic feelings for you, I’d have to admit I have no idea.”

Caspar jumped again. He threw his hands up in surprise. “No, that was definitely not what I was asking!” he protested. Even then, his face was as hot as it had ever been.

Linhardt, straight-faced now, reached their hand out and pressed their thumb gently to his forehead. He flinched, but didn’t draw away from the contact.

“What?” he asked. He already knew what they were doing, after the years they spent all but running the small medical clinic themself, even in a pre-rogue state.

They were taking his temperature, and found it to be within normal homeostatic bounds. This was more accurate than their more distant sensors, so at least now they could be confident that if Caspar did it again, he wasn’t actually sick.

“Your face keeps heating up, and you’re flushing. It’s been happening a lot recently, so I want to make sure you’re not developing a fever.”

He grunted, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “I’m fine,” he said.

“You are.” They pulled their hand away from his skin. “When we were on that satellite, the inn room had a small library. Do you remember?”

“Uh… Not really,” he admitted. “But it’s not like I would have used it or anything.”

They nodded. “No, I only read from it when you were sleeping. Books are still interesting to me. I’d think after so many centuries of tablets and touch screens they might have stopped existing, but they’re still around. Anyway, the books in that room were all various romance books. They even said so on the covers.”

Caspar’s eyes grew wide. “You really spent a handful of nights just reading romance novels?”

“I’m not sure what else I was expected to do in the situation,” they responded casually. “I can’t say I liked them, but I think they gave me a good impression on what romance was like.”

“What’s… it like, then?”

“Romance is when you have really strong feelings of fondness for someone, but it isn’t the same as the fondness I feel towards you. One story, for example, had this woman borderline obsessed with her romantic interest, where she was all she could think about. She told this woman that she’d die for her, if she had to - by the way, there was a war going on, so that’s why dying was relevant - and I think the romantic climax of the story was when the other woman told her that she didn’t want her to die for her, she wanted her to live for her. So romance must be when you feel such a strong fondness for someone, that you’d do whatever they said for their approval.”

“Uh… no.”

“No?”

Caspar smiled distantly and let out a small huff. “That’s kinda unhealthy.”

“Oh.” Linhardt mimicked a face they considered to be shocked. The irony that they had truly and innocently thought something ‘unhealthy’ was not lost on them.

“You were right that… That part of the book sounds pretty romantic to me,” he continued. “But it’s not because she was just doing what she’d asked. It’s that they wanted to spend their lives together, and… I guess if there was a war going on… It’s easier to die in it than get out alive. So it’s kinda, uh, romantic that she would work harder for her girlfriend to show how much she wanted to be with her.”

He took one hand out of his pockets and scratched at the back of his head. “Not that I really know how to explain this stuff. I’ve never… had a boyfriend or anything, so I haven’t really experienced it myself.”

Linhardt smiled. “So there’s a feeling that we’ve experienced in the same way, so far.”

Caspar smiled back. “Haha… Yeah, I guess there is.

“But don’t, like, let Yuri being weird make you think you need to feel any kinda way about it, okay? All your feelings should be yours. No one should make you feel like you have to feel something.”

“I can’t imagine someone might. But that may just be because you haven’t, and I don’t have much experience with people outside of what I was programmed to do,” they conceded. “Not that I really care to. I think you’re as many friends as I need.”

He grinned. Linhardt tried to mimic it, and decided it probably looked unfortunate on their face. They knew the reason he beamed so brightly, though. That was the first time they admitted they were friends themself.


	5. isolation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caspar and Linhardt get separated because Dimitri wants Linhardt alone.

Caspar and Linhardt stayed in the third greenhouse for a while longer. They chatted about whatever came to mind, and examined the odd plants closer, though they could come to no conclusions regarding them without outside knowledge. Even through the continual, low-volume white noise in Linhardt’s head, they were happy to have the time apart from the rest of FARGUSS. By the time they left, and the triangular room decompressed around them, over two hours had passed.

Before they even got close to the door leading to the hallway, though, it opened in front of them, and Balthus was standing on the other side.

He seemed surprised to see them there, but quickly put a smile on his face. “Constance gave you a card to look around, I’m guessing?”

Linhardt nodded. Caspar answered in the affirmative vocally. They looked at him. His shoulders seemed to tense whenever they were speaking to one of the people living at the station.

Balthus entered through the door before it could shut again and trigger another round of decompressure. Behind him, he pulled a familiar-shaped cart, stocked with cleaning supplies and tools. It seemed janitors across the galaxy were similarly equipped.

“I gotta clean out the greenhouses, so I hope you don’t mind if I leave first,” he explained.

“You don’t clean out the third greenhouse,” Linhardt stated.

“Uh… Yeah.” Balthus looked a bit confused, but offered an explanation regardless. “The engineers don’t want me going in there, and Constance says it’s no good either, so I don’t try it. I’ve never actually been in there myself.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Caspar said, in that tone he used whenever he rolled his eyes.

“Well, whatever mess is in there, I don’t have any reason to clean it up.”

Without another word, Balthus moved to the first greenhouse and used his keycard to enter, pulling the cart in after him. Once he was through, and the door shut, Caspar and Linhardt had to wait for another decompression before being allowed to exit completely.

The further they walked from the greenhouses, the less white noise played in Linhardt’s mind. They were apprehensive, though, because they anticipated Dimitri returning to barge into their head.

The hallway to the rest of the station was long. They passed Ingrid on their way there, where she offered them both a friendly wave and a gentle smile.

“So do you still want to take the shuttle back?” Caspar asked, as though seeing someone reminded him of their conversation that morning. “We can see if we can take it, as long as no one else is going to need it in the time it would take to fly back.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt by the AI,” Linhardt said, “so it would be the safest option.”

“You’re back!” Dimitri interjected, inside Linhardt’s head. They stopped in their tracks, and Caspar, who was saying something that Linhardt wanted to hear, faded away into unintelligibility. Instead, Dimitri was filling their mind, and they went back to stiffly restricting their own capabilities to prevent him from eavesdropping.

“I’m ready to share it with you,” Dimitri continued. 

Caspar stepped into the intersection leading to the cafeteria and elsewhere, and not a moment after, a reinforced steel plate fell from the ceiling and split the hallway off from him.

Something spurred Linhardt into action, despite their restraint. “Caspar!” they called, rushing to the metal barrier and immediately searching for some sort of release or mechanism to get it to go back up.

“Linhardt?!” They could hear Caspar’s muffled voice from the other side of the wall. “Dammit! What the hell is this?”

Dimitri’s voice returned to their head, though it fizzled with static. The reinforced steel must have interfered with whatever signal he hijacked to communicate that way. “I don’t want your friend getting hurt,” he said. “So you can do this by yourself can’t you?”

“Open the door, Dimitri,” Linhardt replied tersely.

“We will! Just make sure you get the present, first. Go to Greenhouse One.”

There was a banging from the otherside of the door. Caspar was calling for Linhardt.

“Caspar, can you hear me?” they asked in a raised voice.

“Yeah! Are you okay?!”

“I’m fine. Dimitri did this. Just… Stay put, I’ll be back in a moment and he’ll raise the partition.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s fine,” they said. They didn’t want to lie to Caspar, but they did, because they didn’t see another option. “It’s… a promise, okay?”

“I trust you,” Caspar replied.

They turned and began walking down the hallway the way they’d come.

“You know,” Linhardt began aloud. “This isn’t a nice way to ask me to do something for you. If I knew how to open that door on my own, I would say no on principle.”

“I didn’t want you to ignore me again.” Dimitri’s voice became invaded by more static the further they walked.

Linhardt went back to ignoring him.

Maybe it wasn’t really ignoring him, as they were doing what he asked on the condition he keep his word about opening the partition again. Either way, because he wasn’t nice about asking, they weren’t about to be nice about complying.

Most buildings, spaceships, and satellites had partitions at regular intervals, hiding in the wall or ceiling. They weren’t supposed to be used for any reason other than an emergency, mostly because of their tendency to completely block any traffic. Their purpose was twofold. Engineers and workers could use them to block off areas undergoing renovation or construction in order to work quickly and efficiently without distraction, and they were hermetically sealed. If the construction, or if the section leaked, the partitions would fall and seal the area to prevent the vacuum of space or deadly atmosphere from encroaching and killing everyone in the entire building.

Misusing them for a favor was an insult to Linhardt’s programming, even if their own opinion wasn’t formed as strongly. They were more upset at the implied intent to separate Linhardt from his best friend.

Ingrid was right outside the greenhouse door, tapping on the screen there. Linhardt didn’t care to presume what she was there for, they had more important things to worry about. “Ingrid,” they called.

She turned, offering them that same smile. “Hello again. Oh, where’s… Caspar, was it?”

“The emergency partition fell,” they said at once. “Caspar is on the other side. Can you raise it?”

“Goodness! That shouldn’t be happening!” She pulled herself away from the screen. “They’re meant to be operated remotely, but I can see if there’s a built in override. ...To be honest, though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in all the time I’ve lived here.”

That the partitions had never been used before this incident was not improving Linhardt’s mood.

“You wait here, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

They nodded.

She passed them for the second time, and once they believed she was at an appropriate distance, they opened the greenhouse entry. Dimitri’s chipper voice welcomed them from the interface. They frowned.

They moved to the entry to the first greenhouse before the chamber even started its decompression, and the cardreader let out a negative alert that it wouldn’t open the door until decompression finished.

It felt as though it took an age to finally enter the greenhouse, even if Linhardt’s clock only counted fifty-seven seconds.

Balthus was still inside, sweeping some discarded leaves from the floor into a pan. He looked up upon hearing the door open.

“Need something?” he asked, offering Linhardt a confused look.

“I don’t know,” they said honestly. Their own voice sounded foreign to them. It was no longer the neutral, flat tone they expected of themself. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

Perhaps Dimitri heard that, because the greenhouse began sounding off a cautionary alert. It wasn’t a siren warning of danger, but just of notice.

“Oh, fuck!” Balthus said. He must have recognized it from some prior experience.

At once, he threw his broom down and began moving to a shelf near the door. He kicked at something at the bottom of it. Linhardt noticed then that each shelf had wheels, and he was undoing the break.

“Open the door!” he told Linhardt.

Without any other guidance to go off of, and the apparent urgency Balthus moved with, Linhardt opened the door.

Balthus began wheeling the plants into the triangular room, just as the shutter that blocked out Aster’s light began rising.

The alarm was a notice that the shutters were moving, then. But there were no obvious controls inside the greenhouse itself. They must have been operated remotely… Just like the emergency partitions.

Linhardt understood the urgency. According to the evidence in the second greenhouse, the plants could potentially all wither under Aster’s light. Since Balthus hadn’t been in the third greenhouse, he couldn’t have known of the strange life growing inside there… But this was FARGUSS’ entire food supply, and whatever was in the third greenhouse was not worth trying as a substitute.

They began following Balthus’ lead, undoing the small breaks on the shelves and pushing them towards the door for Balthus to receive. Balthus left one shelf in the doorway, allowing only one other to slip through. The door apparently had sensors to avoid closing on a person, and immediately warned “Something is blocking the door, please remove it so I can close it,” in Dimitri’s voice on repeat.

The shutters continued raising as they and Balthus worked to evacuate the plants.

What was revealed nearly stopped Linhardt in their tracks, but they supposed the advantage to being mechanical was the quantum processing that allowed them to fully examine the windows without impacting their task.

With the shutters up, the greenhouse resembled the other two more, allowing Aster’s light to fill the room. It seemed brighter, as well, because the overhead lights that simulated an appropriate sun still burned.

Aster was visible through the furthest window from the door, but that window had been cracked. Almost the entire thing had some fracture; there wasn’t a square inch that hadn’t been marred by impact.

The cracks intersected and crossed all over the wall, but their random shapes had several circular patterns, suggesting something had impacted against it time and time again.

The moment Linhardt wondered what might have created that damage, they noticed something dark flying straight for the window.

They hastened their pace. It was more important that the atmosphere didn’t corrupt the plants into a mockery of their forms more than the sunlight wilting them. Just as they were pushing another shelf through the doorway, the dark something made impact with the window.

“Shut the door!” Linhardt called to Balthus. They didn’t watch to confirm he did, but could hear the sound of the door sealing them into the greenhouse just as the glass shattered from the impact.

They could see it nearly frame by frame. The glass curved inward at the initial hit, but the battering it had taken before caused it to quickly buckle under the pressure. The glass rushed into the room in nearly every direction, coating the floor and shelves in a glittering layer.

Air rushed in quickly afterwards, and the disparity between the pressure in the room and that outside caused a loud sound as the gases in each quickly crossed the threshold between inside and outside, to create a new equilibrium. They felt a gust of air in a combination of this exchange and the force from the object whip past them and through the shelves of plants. Some of the plants were knocked onto the ground.

The two hadn’t been able to get all the shelves out of the room. In fact, even if they had all the time in the world, they both knew all the shelves couldn’t have fit inside.

The reinforced glass had spilled into the greenhouse. Several shards had fallen into the shelves and plants themselves. Linhardt’s feet crunched against them as they walked forward.

They could only conclude that this was the present Dimitri spoke of… Did Aster tell him?

Did Aster _send it_?

The unidentified object sat in a pile of glass. It didn’t seem large enough to be able to take out such a large reinforced wall of vacuum-grade glass. The force it had to have been propelled at would have needed to be extraordinarily great, even accounting for all the damage that had already been made to the window.

The shutters had probably served as fortification against the other attempts.

With the window broken there was now literally nothing but a gaseous atmosphere and so many kilometers of space separating Linhardt from Aster. For the first time in their on-state, they were technically outside. It was little surprise to them that the white noise invading their thoughts was at the highest volume they’d experienced yet, without any real obstacle to drown it out.

As they stepped forward to retrieve the thing, they could see similar shapes sitting just outside the new opening made in the greenhouse. Dust covered them, to varying degrees of it. This was clearly not the first time Aster had sent a ‘present’.

They leaned down to pick it up. The static roared in their head, but they were more annoyed by its presence than by its actual sound. There was no real indication if it increased with proximity to the ‘present’ or not, so they made no decision regarding it.

The ‘present’ was some segmented stone. In appearance, it resembled obsidian, with a smooth surface and appearing almost as separate smaller shapes that had been melded together and stuck somehow. It was like a black crystal, and it fit almost perfectly into Linhardt’s hand.

They felt a gentle sensation on their cheek and nose, like a cold touch sliding across their face. It was enough to goad them to step outside the window frame.

Their feet made an interesting sound on the dusty ground as they stepped forward. They avoided the other ‘presents’ left by Aster, and turned their gaze towards the sky. It only took twenty paces for them to feel completely alone on the surface of the planet, and in a way they were.

The gentle sensation they felt repeated itself in a larger gust. Unprepared, it nearly knocked them over. It took them a moment to identify it as wind.

When they looked in its direction, they couldn’t see anything that created it. 

They found themself smiling. Linhardt already knew that planets had things like wind and dirt, but standing in the middle of it felt like something special, or more important. It was easy to decide then: they wanted Caspar to feel it too, and they wanted to know how he felt about it.

...Definitely on a safer planet, though, one without such a strange sun watching over it.

They turned, ready to take their decision back to Caspar, and tell him that they understood wanting and sharing better. Their feet had made tracks in the dust from their little excursion, and they covered each footprint a second time, just because they could.

Caspar would be amused with leaving a mark like that, they thought. They couldn’t imagine a similar situation that either of them had ever been in.

As they returned to FARGUSS, the door to the greenhouse opened, and Balthus popped his head through, concern clearly written on his face.

“Are you alright?!” he called out to them. His voice was almost completely drowned out by the static in their head. It took them a moment to sort out his words from the garbled noise.

Their foot came down on the threshold.

“Fine,” they replied, in no real state to modify the default volume of their own voice.

Something crackled through the static filling their mind, but it was entirely unintelligible.

It crackled louder and harsher the more they stepped forward, increasing its intensity almost with every step they took, but it was still hard to discern. It just felt as though their mind was overloaded with input, and rather than trying to sort through it and understand it, they chose to simply allow it to continue. They separated their concentration from it to reduce the strain on their processing, and they liked the apparent outcome of that.

Balthus shut the door. He’d said something before doing so, or they assumed so from the way his mouth moved, but they couldn’t hear it over their inner din. It made sense, though. He was likely worried about the outer atmosphere damaging himself or the plants.

They were a bit glad to be artificial. They didn’t have to worry about the glass cutting their skin, or the air damaging their lungs, or whatever exposure to Aster had done to the plants in Greenhouse Three.

At the very least, they certainly felt _something_ about how many feelings they seemed to be emulating.

Once they reached the door, the static had begun to fade in its intensity, and another input in their head began to form into a coherent message.

> “DON’T LET █████ NEAR █ ███.”

Dimitri’s voice, glitched, did not sound as frantic as they might have anticipated. It was definitely loud, and had a pace indicating some urgency, but it was more flat than they’d expect from an organic, and the glitched words didn’t help.

In any case, the message was extraordinarily poorly planned. Dimitri wanted them to bring the ‘present’ into FARGUSS, but was seemingly protesting their return. 

They decided to continue ignoring him. He made the decision to continue protesting.

> “DON’T LET B████ NE█ THE ██. DON’█ █T BA███S NEAR █ ███. DON’T LET ████ NEAR █E ██. ███ LET BALT██ ██ █E ███. D█’T LET ██THUS █AR █ ██. DON’T LET █████ ██ █ ███. DO█ █ BALTHUS ██ THE ███.”

Linhardt didn’t have much of a choice, considering they couldn’t speak to Balthus with a hermetically sealed door between them and a decompression chamber likely letting out a great gasp of air. They compromised by turning off their ability to hear entirely.

They heard nothing but silence, even though they should have heard an accompanying static left over. Whatever caused it, or however it was made, could not affect them past their hearing. It was a relief to know that in the moments Dimitri had probed their mind, he hadn’t somehow stuck inside.

They opened the door.

Balthus was standing near the door to the hallway. His eyes widened as they entered.

He began speaking again, but Linhardt couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t hear themself as they tried to tell him so, and to caution him to keep his distance.

They held the black crystal close to their chest to demonstrate why. His gaze went from it, to back to Linhardt’s face, to it again. Balthus’ mouth moved again.

Linhardt chose their words carefully, but without hearing, there wasn’t any way to tell if what they were saying made any sense at all. They tried to restate that they couldn’t hear him, then explained Dimitri told them to pick up this meteor and keep it away from him.

The door to Greenhouse One closed behind them, and they leaned against it, maximizing the amount of distance between themself and Balthus. They anticipated the room to decompress, and yet the delay seemed longer than any of the other times they’d moved between the rooms yet.

They felt wind again, but it was unlike outside. The air that brushed against them all went straight towards the vent nearby, and they found themself struggling to turn their head to even look at where it was going. They could see Balthus easily, though.

He was pressed against the door to the hallway, eyes bulging from his head as if he were straining greatly. Linhardt’s database ran an automatic search for matching symptoms and conditions.

They turned their hearing back ‘on’, but it seemed as though there was nothing to hear.

Seconds later, and Balthus collapsed to the ground.

Linhardt tossed the rock aside (to keep it away from him still) and immediately rushed to his side. They stumbled, suddenly finding it a strangely new experience to walk.

They didn’t have the proper knowledge to understand what was happening entirely, but it took only a gentle touch of their hand on Balthus’ skin for their sensors to recognize that his blood oxygen level was dangerously low.

They tried to shout. To them, it was obvious who’s doing this was. They just had to catch the perpetrator’s attention.

Even though they turned their ability to hear back on, they couldn’t hear themself scream. Thankfully, Dimitri’s voice sounded in their mind once again.

“Are you listening now?” he said. His words had a stranger quality than they had had previously. They were hollow, perhaps. Linhardt wouldn’t call them emotionless, but they were hard to interpret as any known feeling.

Linhardt spoke in response. They said yes, and asked Dimitri to open the door.

The door opened. Linhardt and Balthus had spent 46 seconds in a complete, artificial vacuum.

This was something they understood. The oxygen had been pushed out of Balthus’ lungs, forcing his bloodstream to get by on the small amount of oxygen it had to continue homeostasis. He would have fallen unconscious within the first fifteen seconds, and the pressure might have caused his fluids to migrate into places they shouldn’t have been.

This was one of the first events since coming here that Linhardt was probably fully equipped to handle. Half of their processing was dedicated to all the things they needed to prepare to stabilize Balthus. Most of it would be a waiting game, but he’d definitely benefit from an oxygen mask and some fluid.

The other half of their processing was reacting oddly. It kept thinking about how Balthus had been full of life, breathing, and the next moment all the air had been pulled violently from his lungs. He could die, and then he would never be living, breathing, smiling Balthus again.

Linhardt didn’t even know him that well, but they knew it would be a great loss.

They didn’t have a word for what they were feeling, but they knew they _were_ feeling, and they knew that it was in some ways good news to _feel_ , but it came at a very, very, very bad time.

Luckily, Balthus had had time to sequester the shelves of plants into the hallway. Linhardt could see they’d been shoved, not placed. The pathway was blocked, but they made the decision to pull Balthus as far as they could.

“Are you leaving it?” Dimitri asked in their head.

“I have to help Balthus first,” Linhardt replied. Their own voice had a strange quality to it, too. It was raised, their words clipped. “You nearly killed him!”

“I I I I -” Dimitri’s voice hung up on the syllable, screeching inside of Linhardt’s head. It took a moment for him to recover.

Linhardt didn’t wait. They struggled to lift Balthus’ torso with their arms curled under each of his. Qaggar were large beings, and Balthus was surely the upper range of their biological size, if not slightly higher.

They didn’t have muscles to strain, but they certainly weren’t built to carry that amount of weight.

“ I I I didn’t me e e an to!” Dimitri finished in their mind.

Linhardt really didn’t feel like trying to argue morality with him (being in the process of learning it themself as they were aside), so they only gave the briefest of answers to assure Dimitri that they weren’t ignoring him. “Okay.”

Balthus was barely in the hallway. They were glad they weren’t capable of getting tired, but it was still more work than they felt was safe - at this rate, Balthus could suffer long lasting effects without the proper treatment.

“Linhardt?!” Another voice called from the other side of the invading shelves. It sounded like Ingrid.

Some of the shelves moved, and gave them more room to continue to struggle with pulling Balthus further in.

“Are you o-” Ingrid began speaking again, but stopped. “Holy glop! What happened?”

Linhardt tried another tug. Balthus moved maybe a centimeter. “I can explain later. Is there a medbay? He needs oxygen immediately, and I can’t move him myself!”

“Yes, of course. You get his legs, I’ll get his head.”

She moved the shelves more to allow them full access to the rest of the hallway. Linhardt stepped over Balthus’ unconscious form to enter the other side of the room.

“Don’t forget it, please,” Dimitri pleaded in their mind.

“I’ll come back later. Balthus is more important,” they said back.

Ingrid looked up at them. “Pardon?”

She’d already taken their place behind Balthus, wrapping her arms under his arms and around his chest. Her hands were locked together, and with only a membrane separating them, it looked as though she made a contiguous circle around him.

“Nothing,” they replied. They lifted his legs, one for each arm. “Ready when you are.”


	6. Caspar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apart from Linhardt, Caspar stumbles into an investigation of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when i was writing this, i remember not knowing whether or not it was good to do a pov switch like this. i hope you enjoy it regardless; it's much easier to write some one who already knows they have feelings

“It’s fine,” Linhardt said through the reinforced plating that had slammed down in between them. Caspar could barely hear their voice through it, maybe they didn’t think to raise it? “It’s… a promise, okay?”

He was so torn. There wasn’t really any danger to being trapped on that side, as far as Caspar could tell, but it wasn’t as though Linhardt had done much on their own, since becoming rogue. They’d told him of the time they had the night before, but admittedly, he couldn’t really imagine them doing it a second time, especially not so soon. From his perspective, they’d never spent any time apart since leaving their homeship.

On the other hand, he could tell Linhardt was trying to say something genuinely from the heart. They didn’t use the word ‘promise’. Caspar had to explain the concept of one to them just two weeks ago. They were trying to say it in a way that Caspar would understand how they felt about it.

...Or so he felt. Surely someone else might think differently, but he was convinced.

So Caspar wanted to speak from his heart as well. “I trust you,” he replied.

He stood there for a moment, facing the metal partition. He’d struck it with the meat of his hand, curled into a fist, in his frustration at its closing. He held that pose.

“Just… Make sure you don’t get hurt, okay?” he told Linhardt. He knew they’d reply that such a thing was impossible, or maybe even that it didn’t matter if they did, so he added, “I mean, stay safe.”

He didn’t hear them reply.

Caspar sighed and turned around, shoving his hands into his pockets. All at once, he kicked himself. He shouldn’t have walked so far in front of Linhardt, he should have held their hand again, he should have made them promise to just stay still so that he could grab one of the engineers and get them to open the door instead.

They  _ had  _ passed Ingrid in the hallway. Maybe Linhardt was just fetching her? If that were the case, it would probably be better for Caspar to just stay still, even though he’d rather  _ do  _ something than just sit around worrying whether Linhardt was okay or not.

Whatever option he decided on, it didn’t matter if he took a few steps into the intersection and looked around to see if maybe, luckily, one of the engineers was nearby.

He looked towards the cafeteria. Nope. The hallway leading to the landing bay didn’t seem to have any one down it either. And the fourth direction, which Constance had left off the “tour”...

Something black scurried around a corner some distance down it, too quickly for Caspar to recognize as any clear, cohesive shape.

Curiosity often spurred his impulsivity, and now was no exception. Without even pausing to consider what, or who, the black shape could have been or belonged to, Caspar ran down the hallway to pursue it.

Around the bend of the corner was a handful of doors on either side. They had labels that weren’t made of a lit up screen, meaning they likely had physical locks rather than electrical ones. The names on most of the labels reminded him of classrooms. A-100, A-101… They simply followed in a sequence, and Caspar didn’t care enough to check each one.

However, he had been fast enough in his pursuit to see one of the doors shut. Whatever he was following had to have gone into that one - the room where the label was taped over with black electrical tape.

When he opened the door, Caspar found himself facing the entryway to a very strange room. Whatever purpose it had been designed for seemed too far away to even guess. There was a white board on one side of the room, but apart from that, nothing inside the room suggested anything  _ normal _ .

There were glass cases spread about at regular intervals. Caspar compared it in his mind to the dinky museum his homeship sported, displaying relics of the ship’s history in glass boxes with plaques underneath giving context and information about what was held inside. There must have been at least nine or ten glass boxes, Caspar could glean from a glance, and almost all of them had what looked like to his eye the same object.

They were crystals. Each object had two pointed ends, giving it kind of a diamond shape. Some had bulges or other points to them, shaped like Y’s or T’s instead of being one straight diamond. They had different colors or seemingly different textures, but apart from that, Caspar found them identical enough to consider them largely the same thing. Something seemed vaguely familiar about their appearances, but he had more important things to focus on than try to figure out why.

The black thing he had chased down the hallway was standing over one of these glass cases. It didn’t seem to notice Caspar had opened the door.

It looked like a stick person. It had a frame of black metal, wires hanging off at key points. There was a swinging green board attached to its head with wires bundled into the shape of tape, that tapped against the line that would mark its back or body.

It didn’t have hands. The ends of its stick limbs touched each side of the glass box it was hovering over. It seemed to be struggling with something.

“Hey!” Caspar called out. He got the distinct impression that the cases and the things on display inside were not to be touched.

But the stick person didn’t move.

Its head was a mess of computer junk and mechanical parts that Caspar couldn’t really figure out just by looking (not that he knew his way around complicated tech anyway). Various lights on it blinked, but without any knowledge of a pattern Caspar didn’t know if he could really compare it to the way Linhardt’s heart changed colors when they were upset or stressed.

Caspar tried again, “Hey! What are you doing?”

Again, the stick person made no response.

He moved towards it and put his hand on it. Caspar hadn’t thought he pushed it all too hard, but it ended up falling to the ground after the contact. Its stick limbs knocked the glass case as it fell, but the box merely wobbled and fell back into its place.

The stick person, however, fell unceremoniously into a heap of metal and parts. The precariously hanging board clicked loudly against the wall behind it. Its head turned towards Caspar with a mechanical whirring and clicking noise. The lights in its head twinkled and blinked. Caspar could recognize the glass lens of a single camera staring straight at him.

Maybe ‘stick person’ was more of an accurate description than Caspar first thought.

“Uh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize how… light you were. I hope I didn’t… break you?”

He was unsure if he should see this thing as an enemy or friend, but he supposed either way he wouldn’t want to break it.

The stick person whirred and clicked again. He could hear it turn its head to face the camera towards the display case. It turned its back to Caspar.

Was it trying to say something? Caspar could only assume, if it wouldn’t (or couldn’t) speak. 

At the very least, this thing was clearly no threat to him or the rest of the people on the ship, so he didn’t feel any apprehension in turning his attention away from it and towards the glass box.

The crystal inside was sky blue. It had a few protrusions, making it shaped almost like an X. Some of the crystal was rounded, as though the thing had boiled and froze as it bubbled.

It sat on a small black cushion. There was a metal plaque, just like a museum would have an explanatory description. The engraving on the metal read:

In loving memory of Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd.   
4319012020 - 433104030   
You remain your parents' hope. May you find rest, while your other finds discovery.

It didn’t serve as a complete explanation on its own, but it did give Caspar the idea to check other displays and plaques.

Each one carried a name, a string of numbers, and an epitaph. Whatever purpose this room had been intended to serve in the past, it was now acting as a graveyard. The dozen or so displays were each a crystal dedicated to a person who had died.

And it clicked in Caspar’s head: the crystals were similar to those that floated inside of Ingrid, Felix, and Sylvain. They were just… deformed and misshapen into something else.

Could that have killed a rhinoid? Caspar had no idea, but it was definitely something to ask Linhardt.

He looked again to the stick person. His curiosity had pulled him away from Dimitri’s grave and halfway across the room from it, but it remained in the corner. It had moved, propping itself against the wall. It seemed it was struggling to get up, or maybe it couldn’t manage on its own.

In the short time Caspar had seen it, it  _ seemed _ completely harmless, and perhaps a bit clumsy. With something like that, Caspar could do little more than feel kinda bad for it.

That meant he couldn’t just let it stay in a little heap on the floor.

“Alright,” he told it. “I still don’t know what you are, but I can at least help you up and around.”

He stepped over and grabbed it by what bar would classify as its upper arm, pulling it up to its feet and trying to help it balance itself. He put his other hand on the dangling green board to keep it from knocking around. It could likely damage it, if the stick person went back to moving so quickly. That was, if it hadn’t already been damaged in the journey here.

The thing’s head made another whirring sound as it turned its camera back on Caspar’s face.

It had to have some kind of thought, but no way to communicate it. Without a face or other outward sign of what it was doing, Caspar couldn’t really read it as well as he could read Linhardt, either. It was like the most rudimentary form of android imaginable, and Caspar had no idea if it even understood him.

The door to the makeshift cemetery opened.

“Surprise, surprise,” Sylvain said as he entered. “You keep turning up in the darndest places, huh?”

Caspar grit his teeth. He may have wanted to punch Sylvain in the face three times over by now, but it would have disappointed Linhardt to hear of it.

“Where’s your bot?”

At least he wasn’t disrespecting Linhardt immediately.

“They went back to the greenhouse. You should probably know about the emergency partition that suddenly fell in between us. You’re supposed to fix that, right?” 

Caspar didn’t want to start another fight, but he’d always been bad at hiding how he really felt about someone. Their earlier altercation in the cafeteria had only ruined his opinion of Sylvain, and it would be pretty hard for the engineer to ever make it right.

Sylvain froze. He stared at Caspar with a strange look. Maybe it was surprise, or maybe it was disbelief. Caspar didn’t care especially enough to figure out which.

“What are you talking about?” Sylvain asked, voice harsh. “We haven’t seen any sort of notice or…”

“Didn’t you see it in the hallway?”

Sylvain raised his hand to his head, grimacing. “This is such a pain. Of course everything starts going to shit the moment we have company. It’s not even your fault!”

He moved again, holding his hand out towards the stick person. “That’s… That’s Dimitri.”

“What?!” 

Caspar looked once more to the stick person. It had its camera on Sylvain, and it moved one of its ‘arms’ towards him in a silent mirror of the rhinoid’s gesture.

“How?”

“I don’t even want to tell you,” Sylvain explained. “But it’s pretty stupid at this point to keep secrets, right? Surely you saw it in electrical when you two barged in there, yesterday.”

There it was. Caspar put it together at once with that piece of information. He remembered. “Oh yeah! This was on the table! But… I thought it… He isn’t finished.”

“He’s not. Look at him. No real hands or feet. His RAM is flopping around getting all banged up. He has no real way to generate an output like this, and he can’t even hear us. He’s a work in progress; Felix was still waiting on a bunch of supporting parts to make him function more like your little…”

Caspar narrowed his eyes into a glare, fixed on Sylvain. Their eyes met, and the engineer seemed to understand.

“...Friend,” he finished.

“So then… Why is he there? And… here, for that matter.”

“Dunno,” Sylvain answered with a shrug. “But we can’t give him even a rudimentary way to do those things if he’s running all over the place. I was going to bring him back to electrical.”

Caspar nodded. It all made sense, but left a few more questions. Firstly, why or how would Dimitri even get into this thing if it was barely more than a metal frame? He couldn’t imagine it would be comfortable, and there were clear disadvantages. His only idea was that it had something to do with the power outage Linhardt reported, but that didn’t make much of an answer.

“Uh… Hey,” he started. He could maybe get  _ some _ answers from Sylvain, since the guy seemed to be in a decent enough mood for it at the moment. At least, they weren’t at each other’s throats again. “So this place… It’s like a cemetery?”

He nodded. “Yep. We sorta had a plague blow through this place about ten years back. This place wasn’t meant to be a complete colony or anything, so when it was built no one thought we’d need a room like this. This was supposed to be an office or something.”

Sylvain’s head bowed, his eyes sinking to look over at one of the displays. His voice lowered. “...Now look at it.”

“This… Dimitri was looking at one of them. It was his. I don’t know what he was doing, but that’s what I saw when I came in,” Caspar said.

“Oh… Really?” Sylvain looked back up at them with some measure of surprise that Caspar could actually read. “That’s… I mean I guess that makes sense. I think I’d want my heart back if I were in his… er, shoes.”

“So it’s his heart…” Caspar said, more to himself than anyone else. Then, he raised his voice to ask Sylvain, “Can’t we give it to him?”

That was also something Sylvain wasn’t expecting. “Well, he can’t hold it, but… It would be pretty weird for him not to have it.”

That was all the permission Caspar needed to leave Dimitri (propped up against the wall) and remove the glass case from around his heart.

“It’s uh,” Caspar began, looking at Sylvain for guidance, “not an insult or anything if I touch it, right?”

Sylvain shrugged. “I definitely don’t want to touch it myself, but it probably can’t hurt you.”

That was definitely not the way Caspar expected that to be answered! He hadn’t had any worries about getting  _ hurt _ from touching it, but now he did. How would it possibly hurt Sylvain and not Caspar? Was it a rhinoid thing?

At any rate, he decided it deserved more respect than just picking it up anyway. He folded the cushion it was sitting on, trapping it effectively inside, and holding it out for Dimitri.

Dimitri’s stick arms reached out for it. The ends were nothing more than curved metal, with a hole for some kind of bolt or connection to be made. He touched the ends to the back of Caspar’s hands.

Caspar got the sense he intended to take it, but there was no way Dimitri could carry it in that state. He shook his head; the only way he could think to tell him that he couldn’t in a way he would understand.

He hoped Dimitri understood, at least. It would suck if it just looked like Caspar was trying to deny him from having his own heart a second time.

“I need to get him back to electrical,” Sylvain said. His voice had a softer quality. Caspar was surprised he could be gentle at all.

Caspar stepped aside. “You wanna carry him and I’ll bring his heart? He’s not really steady on his legs…”

It hardly needed an explanation. One look at Dimitri’s body here would tell anyone he was a clumsy, wiry thing, clearly unfinished. In Caspar’s opinion, that didn’t mean he had to suffer his own clumsiness.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Sylvain hesitated, but stepped forward and lifted Dimitri up bridal style, curling one arm over his to keep the green board from dangling haphazardly again. Without another word, he began exiting the room, and Caspar assumed he should follow him, so he did.

He kept his distance, just out of respect for how unnerved Sylvain seemed to be about Dimitri’s heart.

When he took another look at it, he supposed he could see why. If it was supposed to look more like Sylvain’s, then it didn’t. It was undeniably misshapen and swollen, and Caspar assumed he might be unnerved by such deformities on a skeleton, too. Still, he didn’t see that as any reason to deny Dimitri the… right?

He turned his head out of curiosity down the hallway towards the greenhouse. The steel partition had disappeared, allowing him to see almost all the way down it. His vision was only stopped by Ingrid, for some reason walking backwards, and Linhardt behind (well, in front of) her, staring over her shoulder at the direction they were slowly moving.

Their eyes caught Caspar’s immediately. Their eyebrows raised, but they didn’t smile. “Caspar!” they called his name with actual  _ emotion _ , like they had in the cafeteria, but this wasn’t them being upset.

It just definitely wasn’t them being happy to see him, either.

“Hey, Linhardt,” he called back, offering a smile despite the… rather harried expression they wore. They were getting pretty good at making expressions, actually! They must have gotten Ingrid to help with the partition, but that didn’t explain why she was walking backwards or… Seemed to be carrying something big in her arms?

“Good job getting --” he began.

They cut him off. “You’re strong. Help us with Balthus.”

“With -- What?!”

Caspar’s exclamation drew Sylvain’s attention. He turned his head, stopping to see what Caspar was doing.

He made a split decision. He hoped it wasn’t insulting, but he put Dimitri’s heart down on the ground, away to the side so that no one would step on it, and quickly trotted down the hallway to help Linhardt and Ingrid. 

“Sorry, Sylvain,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll bring Dimitri’s heart down once I’m done helping them, okay?”

Sylvain didn’t call back, and he didn’t come after him, so Caspar took it as him understanding. 

He came up behind Ingrid. Over her shoulder, he could see Balthus’ unconscious body. Ingrid had his shoulders, and Linhardt was struggling with his legs. Caspar was a little impressed they seemed to have a handle on him. Balthus was  _ big. _

“I can get his shoulders, Ingrid,” he said. “No offense to Lin, but they can’t really carry that much.”

“You sure?” she asked, but time was of the essence enough that she only asked it. She didn’t expect an answer, as she was already moving to replace Linhardt at Balthus’ feet.

He got a good look at the qaggar once she’d moved out of the way. His face seemed a little swollen, but it could just as well be Caspar’s own error. He really didn’t know anything about this stuff, but if Linhardt was worried, he’d be worried too.

Once Ingrid replaced Linhardt, the two of them were able to lift Balthus entirely off the ground, as heavy as he was. It wasn’t as though Caspar could see how effectively they’d been able to transport him before, but from what he was able to tell, Linhardt and Ingrid hadn’t been able to lift him this far off the ground.

It wasn’t easy, but at least they could move more effectively.

“The medbay is down the hallway with the offices,” Ingrid told Caspar. “Did Constance show you yesterday? It will be straight from here, so you just have to walk backwards.”

“Got it,” Caspar replied.

Linhardt hung back a little once they’d started moving again. A glance up at them confirmed they were thinking about something. Their chest was yellow, flickering orange, and they stared at nothing in particular.

And they were wringing their hands. That was new.

“You okay, Lin?”

That got their attention. They stared at him, brows furrowed, mouth slightly parted. He really wanted to know what they were thinking, but this was certainly not the time or place.

“I’ll be right back,” Linhardt said. “Just get him on a bed, I’ll only be a second.”

They did something else that Caspar had never seen them do before -- they  _ ran _ , or at least took off at a jogging pace in the opposite direction, back towards the greenhouses.

Caspar, dumbfounded, didn’t know what to call in response. Linhardt was out of sight before he could muster anything. Ingrid, still present, bore the brunt of his curiosity instead.

“Do you know what happened?”

She shook her head. “Linhardt wouldn’t tell me either. They seemed… Really worried, actually. It’s funny… They certainly aren’t your average robot.”

“...Yeah,” Caspar agreed. “They’re really not…”


End file.
